Iris Recognition Development

Development of Iris Recognition

• Iris recognition has developed rapidly over the past 15 years from its first live demonstration and patent to a mainstream field of biometric development.
• There are a large number of active researchers in both academia and industry contributing to its development.

Iris Recognition Systems

• Over 50 million people worldwide have been enrolled in iris recognition systems that use the author's algorithms.
• Other systems are also being developed, demonstrated, and tested in government-sponsored competitions with good results.

Iris Recognition Mode

• Iris recognition is designed for use in identification mode, involving a "one-to-many" exhaustive search, where a user is not asked to claim or assert an identity.
• This is different from simple verification, which is a "one-to-one" test of a claimed identity.

Deployment and Statistics

• In the United Arab Emirates, a system links all 27 air, land, and sea-ports of entry, comparing the irises of arriving travelers to a central database.
• This system has performed over 5 trillion (5 × 10^12) iris comparisons since 2001.
• About 10 million arriving travelers have used this system, with 12 billion iris comparisons now being performed daily at a speed of about 1 million comparisons per second per search engine.
• Data from 200 billion iris comparisons will be plotted in this chapter.

UK's Project IRIS

• The UK has launched Project IRIS (Iris Recognition Immigration System), which allows travelers to enter the UK from abroad without passport presentation or assertion of identity.
• Travelers can simply look at an iris camera at an automatic gate, and if they are recognized, their border-control formalities are finished and the gate opens.
• About 200,000 travelers to the UK have benefited from this convenience in recent months.