Iris recognition is a powerful technique for biometric identification, but for decades commercial systems imposed substantial constraints on people’s position and motion during the iris recognition process. SRI’s Iris on the Move (IOM) system made it possible to incorporate high-speed biometric identification into existing security infrastructures without limiting throughput.
Previous constraints were largely driven by the image acquisition process, rather than the pattern-matching algorithm used for the recognition process. IOM created a new image acquisition system based on high-resolution cameras, video synchronized strobed illumination and specularity-based image segmentation.
By combining the innovative image acquisition system with a standard iris recognition algorithm, IOM could capture iris images of sufficient quality for iris recognition while subjects walked at a normal pace—dramatically expanding the potential applications for biometric access control.