A Unified Framework for Iris Anti-Spoofing: Introducing Iris Anti-Spoofing Cross-Domain-Testing Protocol and Masked-MoE Method

Iris recognition is widely used in high-security scenarios due to its stability and distinctiveness. However, iris images captured by different devices exhibit certain and device-related consistent differences, which has a greater impact on the classification algorithm for anti-spoofing. The iris of various races would also affect the classification, causing the risk of identity theft. So it is necessary to improve the cross-domain capabilities of the iris anti-spoofing (IAS) methods to enable it more robust in facing different races and devices. However, there is no existing protocol that is comprehensively available. To address this gap, we propose an Iris Anti-Spoofing Cross-Domain-Testing (IAS-CDT) Protocol, which involves 10 datasets, belonging to 7 databases, published by 4 institutions, and collected with 6 different devices. It contains three sub-protocols hierarchically, aimed at evaluating average performance, cross-racial generalization, and cross-device generalization of IAS models. Moreover, to address the cross-device generalization challenge brought by the IAS-CDT Protocol, we employ multiple model parameter sets to learn from the multiple sub-datasets. Specifically, we utilize the Mixture of Experts (MoE) to fit complex data distributions using multiple sub-neural networks. To further enhance the generalization capabilities, we propose a novel method Masked-MoE (MMoE), which randomly masks a portion of tokens for some experts and requires their outputs to be similar to the unmasked experts, which can effectively mitigate the overfitting issue of MoE. For the evaluation, we selected ResNet50, VIT-B/16, CLIP, and FLIP as representative models and benchmarked them under the proposed IAS-CDT Protocol.

@article{zou2025_2408.09752,
  title={ A Unified Framework for Iris Anti-Spoofing: Introducing Iris Anti-Spoofing Cross-Domain-Testing Protocol and Masked-MoE Method },
  author={ Hang Zou and Chenxi Du and Ajian Liu and Yuan Zhang and Jing Liu and Mingchuan Yang and Jun Wan and Hui Zhang and Zhenan Sun },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.09752},
  year={ 2025 }
}