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TECHNOLOGY SPOTLIGHT By Richard Austin Huber The State of Iris Recognition Will technological advances and successful deployments make it the preferred biometric? T he iris, like all biometrics, is a feature that uniquely belongs to a single person; thus, it can be used as a distinctive identifier. Iris recognition, while not new, has gradually emerged as an effective biometric for ascertaining identity quickly and in a manner that does not have the same criminal connotations, cleanliness issues or quality problems as fingerprinting. For this reason, iris recognition is gaining traction in physical and logical access control systems. Because of its reliance on very small templates, iris recognition is also attractive from a storage and performance perspective. The confidence in the technology is on the rise, thanks to the successes of large government programs, as well as the fact that iris cameras are now commodity items. In the end, these factors are all contributing to a marked increase in the rate of adoption in markets such as law enforcement and the military, to civil programs such as travel document issuance and border crossing systems, and even commercial applications — especially banking. 40 The Commercialization of Iris Recognition The idea of using iris for personal identification was originally proposed in 1936 by an ophthalmologist. In 1987, two additional ophthalmologists received a patent for their iris recognition technology. John Daugman, Ph.D., then at Harvard, worked to develop computer algorithms for the concept and later, the three men founded Iridian Technologies, one of the early biometrics companies. In 2008, the Daugman patent expired and the technology continued to advance with R&D; efforts by a number of innovative companies, leading to the adoption of iris technology in a wide range of programs and applications. A typical iris has at least 200 unique, identifying characteristics that can be used for comparison. Iris recognition is basically the matching of those 200 unique identifying characteristics within the iris against other images in a database. Iris recognition begins with capturing a photograph of the eye. No "scanning" is involved; rather, iris images are acquired by taking a photograph in infrared light. www.SecurityInfoWatch.com | SD&I; | November 2013