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In the last decade, research in biometrics has been focused on augmenting the algorithmic performance to address a growing range of applications, not limited to person authentication/recognition. The concept of context awareness emerged as a possible key-factor for both performance optimization and operational adaptation of the capture, extraction, matching and decision stages. This may be particularly effective for multi-biometrics systems. The knowledge of the context in which a task is being performed, may provide useful information to the system in several manners. For example, it may allow to adapt to a specific environmental condition, such as shadow or light exposure. On the other hand, it may be possible to select the best available algorithm, among a given set to address the task at hand, which best performs within the given context. This paper aims to provide an overall vision of the main contributions available so far in the field of context-aware biometric systems and methods. The survey is not confined to a particular biometric modality or processing stage, but rather spans the state of the art of several biometric modalities and approaches. A taxonomy of context-aware biometric systems and methods is also proposed, along with a comparison of their features, aims and performances. The analysis will be complemented with a critical discussion about the state of the art also suggesting some future application scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Iris recognition is one of the most promising fields in biometrics. Notwithstanding this, there are not so many research works addressing it by machine learning techniques. In this survey, we especially focus on recognition, and leave the detection and feature extraction problems in the background. However, the kind of features used to code the iris pattern may significantly influence the complexity of the methods and their performance. In other words, complexity affects learning, and iris patterns require relatively complex feature vectors, even if their size can be optimized. A cross-comparison of these two parameters, feature complexity vs. learning effectiveness, in the context of different learning algorithms, would require an unbiased common benchmark. Moreover, at present it is still very difficult to reproduce techniques and experiments due to the lack of either sufficient implementation details or reliable shared code. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]