How iris recognition works

Author

Daugman, John

Author_Institution

Comput. Lab., Cambridge Univ., UK

Volume

1

fYear

2002

fDate

2002

Abstract

The principle that underlies the recognition of persons by their iris patterns is the failure of a test of statistical independence on texture phase structure as encoded by multiscale quadrature wavelets. The combinatorial complexity of this phase information across different persons spans about 249 degrees of freedom and generates a discrimination entropy of about 3.2 bits/mm² over the iris, enabling real-time decisions about personal identity with extremely high confidence. Algorithms first described by the author in 1993 have now been tested in several independent field trials and are becoming widely licensed. This presentation reviews how the algorithms work and presents the results of 9.1 million comparisons among different eye images acquired in trials in Britain, the USA, Korea, and Japan.

Keywords

biometrics (access control); computational complexity; entropy; eye; image recognition; image texture; statistical analysis; wavelet transforms; Britain; Japan; Korea; USA; biometric identification systems; combinatorial complexity; discrimination entropy; eye images; field trials; iris patterns; iris recognition; multiscale quadrature wavelets; personal identity; persons recognition; phase information; statistical independence test; texture phase structure; Airports; Biometrics; Demodulation; Eyelids; Face recognition; Image recognition; Iris recognition; Laboratories; Pattern recognition; Testing;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Image Processing. 2002. Proceedings. 2002 International Conference on

ISSN

1522-4880

Print_ISBN

0-7803-7622-6

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICIP.2002.1037952

Filename

1037952