Find news and information for the executive corporate security director, CSO, facility manager and assets protection manager on issues of policy, products, incidents, risk management, threat assessments and preparedness.
Issue link: http://sdi.epubxp.com/i/209760
TECHNOLOGY SPOTLIGHT The accuracy afforded by iris recognition, together with its fast search speeds (140+ million eyes per second) and small templates (1 million iris templates can be stored on just one gigabyte), make it an attractive method for identifcation — often more so than fngerprint or facial image comparisons. 42 The accuracy afforded by iris recognition, together with its fast search speeds (140+ million eyes per second) and small templates (1 million iris templates can be stored on just one gigabyte), make it an attractive method for identification — often more so than fingerprint or facial image comparisons. These attributes also make it viable for even the largest identity programs. Accuracy and Performance The U.S. government has been testing biometric vendors since the earliest days of the industry, in order to establish objective metrics for comparing technologies and to support users in making procurement decisions. The objective, non-biased, scientific approach of the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST) makes its tests the gold standard of accuracy assessment. IREX III was the first independent test of one-to-many identification using a large, real-world dataset. The finding of the test was that iris is indeed a viable biometric for large-scale identification and an order of magnitude more accurate than face. The test also concluded that enrollment and search of both eyes offers better accuracy than a single eye. IREX IV, released on July 11, 2013, compared the performance of iris algorithms from leading providers on operational databases of more than a million iris records. Here are a few iris performance statistics: • The false non-match rate is less than one percent using two eyes. Using a single eye, results are nearly as good. • Iris-match speed is 140+ million eyes per second. • More than 100 million iris templates can be stored on a single piece of contemporary server hardware (1M templates/1 Gb RAM). • Two-eye iris recognition is more accurate than face and 10-print fingerprint. In addition to progress in algorithm accuracy and speed, there has been equally impressive progress in biometric platform architecture. Today, the best search engines perform multi-modal biometric (face, fingerprint and iris) searches in the same software application, thus reducing system complexity as well as scale with fusion and pipelining techniques. They run on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) servers and use a mixture of commercial and free and open source (FOSS) noSQL databases for data storage. Scalability has been proven even in identification programs that include hundreds of millions of records. Finally, interfacing with mature COTS search engines is relatively simple due to the open-standards based, service-oriented architectures. Rapid Identification for Law Enforcement For law enforcement and the military, it is often critically important to identify an individual as quickly as possible. Significant time and effort is wasted when officers fill out forms for arrests of repeat criminals. Additionally, criminals often provide aliases that waste time in the booking process. Another problem is the movement of criminals from one physical location to another (e.g. local precinct, courthouse, prison). Ensuring that only inmates qualified for the work release program exit the facility and get on the bus, for example, is not a trivial problem. Dispensing medications to appropriate individuals is another challenge in a correctional facility. All of these problems can be addressed by using the iris to rapidly identify a person already in the database, such as through a prior arrest and/or conviction. Basically, an iris is quickly captured and searched against a database, with the result is returned within seconds. Fingerprints, the most commonly used ID method, can take several minutes, even as many as 30, to acquire and even longer to return results, depending on the size and location of the identification system. Rapid irisbased identification can be performed at multiple points in the process of moving a person from location to location, as required. Several law enforcement agencies have successfully used iris matching technology to rapidly and accurately identify criminals in this way. One state deployed 64 multi-biometric booking workstations at major arrest and arraignment locations to begin building an iris identification database that will allow for rapid www.SecurityInfoWatch.com | SD&I; | November 2013