The process of iris recognition is composed of several stages. The most important stage is feature extraction. The majority of systems use a single method of feature extraction. We used a binary genetic algorithm with a new fitness criterion to find an efficient combination of feature extraction methods with the aim of improving the performance of iris recognition systems. The proposed method makes use of a large number of filters and transforms which are widely used to extract iris features. The best combination of these techniques is found over iterations of the proposed algorithm. The final combination, which is argued to be the most efficient method of feature extraction, consists of a number of wavelet transforms, Gabor filter, and Fourier transform. ROC graphs are used to show the experimental superiority of the performance of this method over methods that use a single filter. According to our findings, the proposed method shows better performance in most situations. An FAR value of 0 and an FRR value of 0.092 was obtained by this method.
