Meet the inventor of Iris Recognition System

Professor John Daugman OBE

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Professor of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 
Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge.


Professor John Daugman’s research focuses on statistical pattern recognition, computer vision, decision theory and neural computing. One development and outgrowth of this research has been iris recognition, an automatic and rapid method for determining a person’s identity with very high confidence, by mathematical analysis of the random patterns that are visible in the iris of an eye.

Professor Daugman’s algorithms for this process have been licensed internationally and are the basis of all current publicly deployed iris recognition systems. Amongst other locations, these systems are currently being used in some airports, where governments including that of the UK, allow the process to be substitute for a passport.

He received his AB and PhD from Harvard, where he went on to teach on the Faculty. Before coming to Cambridge he held the Toshiba Chair at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan, and during 2002-2004 he was the Johann Bernoulli Professor of Mathematics and Informatics at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands.

Along with his OBE, which he received in 1999, he has also been awarded the 1997 Information Technology Award and Medal of the British Computer Society, the 2000 Technology Innovation Award of the US Smithsonian Museum and the UK Design Council “Millennium Product” award, for his work on iris recognition for persona.

reference:

<http://www.csap.cam.ac.uk/network/john-daugman/>

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Comparison of Iris Scanner to the Retina Recognition System

 

So let’s start by defining what an iris is as compared to the retina.  I found a picture that is a good representation of this.  If you look at someone’s eye, the colored section you see is the iris.  That is what is scanned using an iris scanner.  Behind someone’s eye is the retina, and this cannot be seen with the naked eye.  That is why retinal scanners use IR rays in order to generate an image of the retina.

Now you know the major difference between the two technologies.  However I am not going to stop there.  I will tell you how you can easily distinguish between the two technologies if you saw someone using them.  

A retinal scanner is considered more intrusive and is also slower.  For a retinal scan the subject’s eye generally has to be within 3 inches of the scanner and the subject has to focus on a point of green light that he/she would see in the scanner.  The retinal scanner scans about 400 reference points that it uses for identification processes and it takes about twenty seconds.  

As compared to the retinal scanner an iris scanner is a lot faster taking only about two seconds.  The iris scanner can be used from a much farther distance of up to two feet and uses about 240 reference point.  

So basically if the scan is taken at a very short distance and if the scan takes a little while then it is a retinal scan, and if it is done at a longer distance and is instantaneous then it is an iris scan.  Now hopefully you will never make the mistake of misidentifying the two technologies. 

reference:

<scanmein.blogspot.com/2011/04/iris-vs-retina.html>

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Who invented iris scanner ?

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