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.