The pattern of vessels supplying blood to the retina is a unique feature in each eye and can be used to authenticate an individual. This feature is impossible to forge and the blood vessels decay too fast to allow the eye of a deceased person to be used to deceive the system. Furthermore, the vascular pattern is virtually constant over the entire life span of the target individual.

The DRIVERA database

To promote research in the field of retina-based person authentication, a database is needed that allows for comparisons between various algorithms. Such a database can be generated with help of the software that is provided for download here. This software will transform the publicly available Digital Retinal Images for Vessel Extraction (DRIVE) database -- it contains a set of retina images together with a manual ground truth -- into the DRIVE for retina-based authentication (DRIVERA) database.

Software

For each DRIVE image, 14 more images are generated while applying various types of distortions, like:

1.     small rotations, translations and scalings of the original images,
2.     blurring, barrel and pincushion transforms applied to the original images,
3.     changes in illumination and addition of white and ''salt\&pepper" noise.

The distortions are randomly applied. An image may be affected by one or  several of such distortions. The DRIVERA database contains only gray-level images obtained from the green channel of each original image.