Iris Scanning Goes Big
Iris scanning seems to be all the rage now that the United States Department of Homeland Security has announced a plan to test a variety of biometric iris recognition systems this month at a border station in Texas. With plans to identify illegal immigrants and criminal suspects under the department’s program US-VISIT, they hope to rely less on the more traditional biometric scanning like fingerprinting and facial recognition. Both are used at airports and border crossings, but these techniques have their limitations.
Eighty-five thousand people travel each day and the amount of scans needed is hefty. Ideally, the government would have a system that combined the various techniques into one program, a catch-all security system. We’re just not there yet.
Fingerprints can be difficult, as they can be inconsistent due to manual labor or injury. Faces, of course, change over time as a person puts on weight, grows a beard, gets a scar, or even has plastic surgery done. To match a face against the millions of faces in databases at this point takes a long time and the algorithms and computing power are not there.
Iris scanning is certainly easier and from what we’ve read nearly everywhere it’s more accurate, but irises do change over time. Systems have been in place in the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom for some time now. They are based off a bitmap file that consists of approximately 2000 bits, says Bojan Cukic, a co-director at the Center for Identification Technology at West Virginia University in Morgantown. He says it’s a well-developed process and has been shown to display good results, with low false successes and false reject rates overall. Still, with irises changing each year, as studies suggest, it’s possible that in order to keep things current, subjects would need to be rescanned every twelve months.
As to how the new technology is employed, we’ll have to wait and see. That’s a job for the Department of Homeland Security.
There are a lot of sites covering their plans this month (we’ve written a number of articles on this already), and we expect to hear news on the results shortly. Keep an eye on Eye Tracking Update.
Related articles:
- Eye Tracking: Iris Scanning to be the Ultimate Reference Point?
- Eye Tracking: Iris Scanning Is Coming, Like It Or Not
- Can Iris Scanning Technology Tell the Difference Between Twins?
- The All-In-One AOptix Face and Iris Recognition System
- Iris Recognition: The Fingerprint of the Eye
- Beware of Problems With Iris Recognition
- Iris Recognition: There’s No Escape with New Security Cameras
- Iris Recognition is Advancing. Could It Help Eye Tracking?
- Iris Recognition That Detects Hostiles Being Developed for Darpa
- Iris Recognition Finds Support at U.S. State Department