How iris recognition works

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.