  The iris can be considered as one of the most important biometric traits due
to its high degree of uniqueness. Iris-based biometrics applications depend
mainly on the iris segmentation whose suitability is not robust for different
environments such as near-infrared (NIR) and visible (VIS) ones. In this paper,
two approaches for robust iris segmentation based on Fully Convolutional
Networks (FCNs) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are described.
Similar to a common convolutional network, but without the fully connected
layers (i.e., the classification layers), an FCN employs at its end a
combination of pooling layers from different convolutional layers. Based on the
game theory, a GAN is designed as two networks competing with each other to
generate the best segmentation. The proposed segmentation networks achieved
promising results in all evaluated datasets (i.e., BioSec, CasiaI3, CasiaT4,
IITD-1) of NIR images and (NICE.I, CrEye-Iris and MICHE-I) of VIS images in
both non-cooperative and cooperative domains, outperforming the baselines
techniques which are the best ones found so far in the literature, i.e., a new
state of the art for these datasets. Furthermore, we manually labeled 2,431
images from CasiaT4, CrEye-Iris and MICHE-I datasets, making the masks
available for research purposes.
