Iris Biometrics for Embedded Systems

In many applications user authentication has to be carried out by portable devices. Usually these devices are personal tokens carried by users, which have many constraints regarding their computational performance, occupied area, and power consumption. These kinds of devices must deal with such constraints, while also maintaining high performance rates in the authentication process. This paper provides solutions to designing such personal tokens where biometric authentication is required. In this paper, iris biometrics have been chosen to be implemented due to the low error rates and the robustness their algorithms provide. Several design alternatives are presented, and their analyses are reported. With these results, most of the needs required for the development of an innovative identification product are covered. Results indicate that the architectures proposed herein are faster (up to 20 times), and are capable of obtaining error rates equivalent to those based on computer solutions. Simultaneously, the security and cost for large quantities are also improved.