ISO/IEC 19794-6:2005 specifies two alternative image interchange formats for biometric authentication systems that utilize iris recognition.
The first is based on a rectilinear image storage format that may be a raw, uncompressed array of intensity values or a compressed format such as that specified by ISO/IEC 15444.
The second format is based on a polar image specification that requires certain pre-processing and image segmentation steps, but produces a much more compact data structure that contains only iris information.
Data that comply with either one of the iris image formats specified in ISO/IEC 19794-6:2005 are intended to be embedded in a CBEFF-compliant structure in the CBEFF Biometric Data Block (BDB) as specified in ISO/IEC 19785-1.