Eyes have always been the windows to the soul; now, they're the basis of the latest identification technology--iris recognition, a security system to identify people by their iris patterns. It will be showcased next month at the winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, where access to rifles for the biathlon will be protected with the aid of iris recognition.
Unique landscape. Iris is said to discriminate even better than DNA.
J. DAUGMAN
The iris is "stable, rich in discriminators, and unique," says Don Richards, a spokesperson for the product's manufacturer, IriScan of Mount Laurel, New Jersey. It's one of life's more varied landscapes, with lines, dots, rings, pits, crypts, freckles, coronas, striations, stromal fibers, contraction furrows, collagenous filaments, and serpentine vasculature. With 266 physical features that vary from one person to the next, the iris has "vastly more mathematical complexity than any other biometric," including fingerprints, the retina's blood vessels, or even DNA fingerprinting--which, unlike irises, can't differentiate identical twins--says John Daugman, a Cambridge University professor who developed the mathematical equations underlying iris encoding and recognition.
The system works like this: A person stands for a few seconds 20 or so centimeters from a video camera, which captures iris images and translates selected landmarks into a 256-byte code. The iris is divided into eight concentric zones, which make it possible to recognize it regardless of how dilated the pupil is--features can be located even when the rings are compressed, says Daugman. The system is foolproof, its makers claim: Because a living pupil oscillates continuously, a glass eye would be a sitting duck. And a contact lens with a faked iris would be convex, not flat like a real iris. Isao Shimozaki, security manager for the Nagano Organizing Committee, adds that iris scanning beats fingerprints for another reason: "Some people find ... systems where they have to touch something unpleasant."
The technology, which is being explored by Asian banks and British Telecom, might also be adapted as a substitute for marking or tagging animals, notes Richards. Indeed, the Japanese Racing Association wants to move to iris identification for thoroughbreds.
