As iris systems evolve towards a more relaxed acquisition, low image resolution will be a predominant issue. In this paper we evaluate a super-resolution method to reconstruct iris images based on Eigen-transformation of local image patches. Each patch is reconstructed separately, allowing better quality of enhanced images by preserving local information. We employ a database of 560 images captured in visible spectrum with two smartphones. The presented approach is superiorto bilinear or bicubic interpolation, especially at lower resolutions. We also carry out recognition experiments with six iris matchers, showing that better performance can be obtained at low-resolutions with the proposed eigen-patch reconstruction, with fusion of only two systems pushing the EER to below 5-8% for down-sampling factors up to a size of only 13x13. © 2015 IEEE.
F. A.-F. was funded by EU COST Action IC1106, the Swedish Research Council, and the CAISR program of the Swedish Knowledge Foundation.