Lightweight and efficient dual-path fusion network for iris segmentation

In order to tackle limitations of current iris segmentation methods based on deep learning, such as an enormous amount of parameters, intensive computation and excessive storage space, a lightweight and efficient iris segmentation network is proposed in this article. Based on the classical semantic segmentation network U-net, the proposed approach designs a dual-path fusion network model to integrate deep semantic information and rich shallow context information at multiple levels. Our model uses the depth-wise separable convolution for feature extraction and introduces a novel attention mechanism, which strengthens the capability of extracting significant features as well as the segmentation capability of the network. Experiments on four public datasets reveal that the proposed approach can raise the MIoU and F1 scores by 15% and 9% on average compared with traditional methods, respectively, and 1.5% and 2.5% on average compared with the classical semantic segmentation method U-net and other relevant methods. Compared with the U-net, the proposed approach reduces about 80%, 90% and 99% in terms of computation, parameters and storage, respectively, and the average run time up to 0.02 s. Our approach not only exhibits a good performance, but also is simpler in terms of computation, parameters and storage compared with existing classical semantic segmentation methods.