Summary

The next time you look into someone’s eye, you will be able to better appreciate how the iris can be used to identify and authenticate.

In this chapter, we reviewed the evolution of iris recognition, from the early days of Alphonse Bertillon dabbling into using the eye as an identifier in the 1880s, to John Daugman’s studies in the 1980s, to today’s modern systems. You now can see how the iris provides an optimal biometric that can be used in a wide range of applications. We took a closer look at the eye itself, and, more specifically, the colored portion or uvea. In addition, we evaluated some diseases and conditions that could affect iris recognition.

We then stepped through the process of iris recognition. We learned how using IR light enhances the ability to obtain an iris image with greater detail. We saw how the Hamming distance can be a metric for determining a match, and we covered some ways an iris recognition system can be spoofed, along...