Age dependency of the diabetes effects on the iris recognition systems performance evaluation results

In this paper, we attempt to answer the questions whether iris recognition task under the influence of diabetes would be more difficult and whether the effects of diabetes and individuals' age are uncorrelated. We hypothesized that the health condition of volunteers plays an important role in the performance of the iris recognition system. To confirm the obtained results, we reported the distribution of usable area in each subgroup to have a more comprehensive analysis of diabetes effects. There is no conducted study to investigate for which age group (young or old) the diabetes effect is more acute on the biometric results. For this purpose, we created a new database containing 1,906 samples from 509 eyes. We applied the weighted adaptive Hough ellipsopolar transform technique and contrast-adjusted Hough transform for segmentation of iris texture, along with three different encoding algorithms. To test the hypothesis related to physiological aging effect, Welches's t-test and Kolmogorov-Smirnov test have been used to study the age-dependency of diabetes mellitus influence on the reliability of our chosen iris recognition system. Our results give some general hints related to age effect on performance of biometric systems for people with diabetes.