Are iris crypts useful in identity recognition?

We conducted an experiment in which participants were asked to annotate the crypts they see in iris images. The results were used to assess the utility of crypts in identity recognition for forensic applications. Although the inter-participant annotation consistency may be limited by crypts' noticeability and the range of genuine similarity scores obtained by the adopted matcher is correlated to the number of crypt pixels in the given image, the intra-iris crypt perception is sufficiently consistent for nearly 95% of query images to be correctly identified. The performance is expected to be better for the professional examiners with comprehensive training.