Iris research has become an inevitable trend in the application of identity recognition due to its uniqueness, stability, non-aggression and other advantages. In this paper, an improved iris localization method is presented. When the iris inner boundary is located, a method for extracting the iris inner boundary based on morphology operations with multi- structural elements is proposed. Firstly, the iris image is pre-processed, and then the circular connected region in the pre- processed image is determined, the parameters of the circular connected region is extracted, finally the center and the radius of the circular connected region is obtained, i.e., the iris inner boundary is excavated. When the iris outer boundary is located, a method for locating iris outer boundary based on annular region and improved Hough transform is proposed. The iris image is first filtered, and then the filtered image is reduced and an annular region is intercepted, finally Hough transform is used to search the circle within the annular region, i.e., the center and the radius of the iris outer boundary is obtained. The experimental results show that the location accuracy rate of this proposed method is at least 95% and the average running time is increased by 46.2% even higher. Therefore, this proposed method has the advantages of high speed, high accuracy, strong robustness and practicability.

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