Iris Recognition: There’s No Escape with New Security Cameras
We posted an article a few weeks ago about Professor Marc Christensen’s work at Southern Methodist University working with iris scanning and security. The Pentagon has issued funding to Christensen’s team at the university in an effort to provide better security and accurate identification of potential suspects. Creating a discrete scanning technology for non-cooperative people is quite a challenge, and you’d think that someone could easily avoid an iris scan. But the work at Southern Methodist University makes it impossible to dodge the scan, even if you keep your head down while walking past high-tech security cameras.
Electrical engineers at SMU first created the cameras with funding from Darpa, the Pentagon’s research agency. They are calling the camera Panoptes, and the device uses a series of low-resolution sensors to create a singe high-resolution image that can be captured with a lightweight, ultra-slim camera. As the cameras don’t have a lens, they can be produced extremely thin.
The Pentagon has issued another $1.6 million for Christensen and his team at SMU to merge the cameras with active illumination and handheld Pico projection devices. Photos captured on the slim devices can be then transformed for large format viewing, making better scanning possible.
Christensen hopes the latest technology will let them do even more than what a regular lens can do, with enhanced resolution and 3-D imagery at better, more accurate levels. The new devices should create a robust 3-D image useful for seeing in caves and dark urban areas, and importantly, for the creation of “versatile ‘non-cooperative’ iris-detection security cameras.”
This means a camera with the ability to scan your iris even if you don’t want it to be scanned. The new innovation for Panoptes is called Smart-Iris, and it’s being developed in conjunction with another professor at SMU who specializes in biometric identification. Smart-Iris is supposed to eliminate problems like glare, eyelashes, dim lighting, and an unwillingness to stop and stare directly into a dedicated iris-detection camera. The device can zero in on a face, no matter the angle or rate of movement, and then focus right on the iris. A wall-mounted Panoptes camera, for example, could scan a long line of people, and they wouldn’t necessarily notice it was happening.
Of course, there are privacy and ethical issues that come hand in hand with any biometric scanning device, camera, or public observation technology, especially when it’s inelective. These will need to be worked out at some point. But for now, it’s interesting news for the biometrics, eye tracking, and iris scanning worlds.
See the original article posted at Wired.com:
Darpa’s Beady-Eyed Camera Spots the ‘Non-Cooperative’
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