How Iris Recognition Works

Algorithms developed by the author for recognizing persons by their iris patterns have now been tested in many field and laboratory trials, producing no false matches in several million comparison tests. The recognition principle is the failure of a test of statistical independence on iris phase structure encoded by multi-scale 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 b/mm/sup 2/ over the iris, enabling real-time decisions about personal identity with extremely high confidence. The high confidence levels are important because they allow very large databases to be…