Ethnicity and Biometric Uniqueness: Iris Pattern Individuality in a West
  African Database
John Daugman Cathryn Downing Oluwatobi Noah Akande Oluwakemi Christiana Abikoye
We conducted more than 1.3 million comparisons of iris patterns encoded from
images collected at two Nigerian universities, which constitute the newly
available African Human Iris (AFHIRIS) database. The purpose was to discover
whether ethnic differences in iris structure and appearance such as the
textural feature size, as contrasted with an all-Chinese image database or an
American database in which only 1.53% were of African-American heritage, made a
material difference for iris discrimination. We measured a reduction in entropy
for the AFHIRIS database due to the coarser iris features created by the thick
anterior layer of melanocytes, and we found stochastic parameters that
accurately model the relevant empirical distributions. Quantile-Quantile
analysis revealed that a very small change in operational decision thresholds
for the African database would compensate for the reduced entropy and generate
the same performance in terms of resistance to False Matches. We conclude that
despite demographic difference, individuality can be robustly discerned by
comparison of iris patterns in this West African population.