Towards Robust Iris Recognition Through Occlusion Identification and Conditional Diffusion-Based Reconstruction
Iris recognition is a reliable biometric approach that identifies individuals using the distinctive and stable texture of the iris. However, recognition performance can degrade when discriminative iris texture is partially occluded by eyelids, eyelashes, specular reflections, or other acquisition artifacts. Existing approaches often perform recognition directly on degraded samples or rely only on the remaining visible iris region, which may be inadequate when substantial texture is corrupted. To address this limitation, we propose an occlusion-aware iris recognition framework with three sequen