A New Circle Detection Algorithm for Pupil and Iris Segmentation from the Occluded RGB images

In this paper we introduce a new circle detection algorithm for occluded on/off pupil and iris boundary extraction. The proposed algorithm employs 7-step processing to detect a center and radius of occluded on/off eye images using the property of the chords. The algorithm deals with two types of occluded pupil and iris boundary information; one is composed of circle-shaped, incomplete objects, which is called occluded on iris images and the other type consists of arc objects in which circular information has partially disappeared, called occluded off iris images. This method shows that the center and radius of iris boundary can be detected from as little as one-third of the occluded on/off iris information image. It is also shown that the proposed algorithm computed the center and radius of the incomplete iris boundary information which has partially occluded and disappeared. Experimental results on RGB images and IR images show that the proposed method has encouraging performance of boundary detection for pupil and iris segmentation. The experimental results show satisfactorily the detection of circle from incomplete circle shape information which is occluded as well as the detection of pupil/iris boundary circle of the occluded on/off image.