Deep neural network and data augmentation methodology for off-axis iris segmentation in wearable headsets

A data augmentation methodology is presented and applied to generate a large dataset of off-axis iris regions and train a low-complexity deep neural network. Although of low complexity the resulting network achieves a high level of accuracy in iris region segmentation for challenging off-axis eye-patches. Interestingly, this network is also shown to achieve high levels of performance for regular, frontal, segmentation of iris regions, comparing favourably with state-of-the-art techniques of significantly higher complexity. Due to its lower complexity this network is well suited for deployment in embedded applications such as augmented and mixed reality headsets.