Is There Any Similarity Between a Person’s Left and Right Retina?

Abstract

It is often argued among biometric researchers that the left and right retinas of the same person are as different as the retinas of two different persons. In this paper we investigate to what extent this is true. We perform experiments where human volunteers are asked to judge whether a pair of the left and right retinal images displayed side-by-side belongs to the same person or two different persons. We also use two similarity measurements, structural similarity (SSIM) and cosine similarity, to do the investigation process automatically. Our experiments show that there is recognizable similarity in the left and right retina of a person. For a verification task done by human volunteers, the average accuracy was 82%. For identification tasks, automatic systems using cosine similarity were correct in up to 57%.