Iris Recognition from Websites and Social Media: State of the Art and Privacy Concerns

Traditional iris recognition systems rely on dedicated sen-sors, typically using near-infrared illumination, which demand a high degree of user cooperation. Recent studies have demonstrated the feasi-bility of performing iris recognition on samples captured from uncoopera-tive users in uncontrolled environments, including ocular images cropped from high-resolution facial portraits posted on websites and social media. These advancements are largely driven by novel artificial intelligence techniques and the availability of datasets containing ocular samples collected under non-ideal conditions. Nevertheless, the improved a ccu-racyandrobustnessofirisrecognitionmethodsintroducenewchallengesrelatedtoprivacyprotection.Thischapterexaminesrecentadvance-mentsinirisrecognitionusingsamplesobtainedfromwebsitesandsocialmedia,focusingonalgorithms,publicdatasets,privacyconcerns,andpotentialmitigationstrategies.