Recognizing Persons by their Iris Patterns - John Daugman, The Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

Iris recognition provides real-time, high confidence identification of persons by mathematical analysis of the complex 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 epigenetic and stable throughout life, it can serve as a living password or passport. Recognition decisions are made with confidence levels high enough to support exhaustive searches through national databases. The principle underlying the iris recognition algorithms is the failure of a test of statistical independence on phase sequences as encoded by multi-scale quadrature wavelets.  This test of independence involving about 250 degrees-of-freedom is passed whenever different irises are compared, but it is failed when images of the same iris are compared.  It is unnecessary for users to assert any identity which is then merely verified; rather, their identity is discovered by searching databases of enrolled IrisCodes at a speed of 1 million persons in 1.7 seconds.  Data will be presented in this lecture from 9.1 million IrisCode comparisons and from independent test reports.  These algorithms are used now for passenger identification at several airports including Heathrow, Schiphol, JFK, and Toronto in lieu of Passport presentation, and are being considered for National ID cards.