Introduction to Iris Recognition for Personal Identification

Iris recognition illustrates work in computer vision, pattern recognition, and the man-machine interface. The purpose is real-time, high confidence recognition of a person's identity by mathematical analysis of the random patterns that are visible within the iris of an eye from some distance. Because the iris is a protected internal organ whose random texture is stable throughout life, it can serve as a kind of living password that one need not remember but one always carries along. Because the randomness of iris patterns has very high dimensionality, recognition decisions are made with confidence levels high enough to support rapid and reliable exhaustive searches through national-sized databases.

Algorithms developed by John Daugman at Cambridge are today the basis for all iris recognition systems worldwide. In America and Japan, the main applications are entry control, ATMs, and Government programmes. In Britain, The Nationwide Building Society introduced iris recognition within its cash dispensing machines (in lieu of PIN numbers) in 1998. A new development at some airports is ticketless air travel, allowing passenger and baggage check-in and other security procedures based on the traveller's iris patterns. Beyond its use in financial transactions, iris recognition is forecast to play a role in a wide range of other applications in which a person's identity must be established or confirmed. These include passport control, electronic commerce, entitlements payments, premises entry, access to privileged information, authorizations, forensic and police applications, computer login, or any other transaction in which personal identification currently relies just on special possessions or secrets (keys, cards, documents, passwords, PINs).

(Intro links to original 1993 and 1994 work, and to more recent developments through 2000.)