Correspondenceless Stereo for 3-D Iris Location

Abstract

We present a correspondenceless stereo system locating the circular contour of an iris (limbus) in space, and therefore its 3-D plane. We avoid correspondence search completely by intersecting a bundle of conjugate epipolar lines with the elliptical images of the limbus in the stereo pair of images, which gives correspondences directly. The ellipses are located by active ellipse fitting. An efficient simulated annealing implementation achieves reliable iris location with uncontrolled illumination and eye or head movements. Tests with ground-truthed 3-D setups as well as real eye images indicate very good accuracy.