Computer scientist sees new possibilities for ocular biometrics (Phys.org)
[Oleg Komogortsev and a team at Texas State University] are developing a three-layered, multi-biometric approach that tracks the movement of the eye globe and its muscles, and monitors how and where a person’s brain focuses visual attention, in addition to scanning patterns in the iris. The iris is the colored part of the eye.
Readying Iris Recognition for Prime Time (Bank INfo Security)
Federal researchers have reconfirmed the reliability of the iris as an authentication factor. But we’re at least three years away from using iris scanning as an advanced method of user authentication for IT systems.
What’s holding back iris recognition as an authentication tool to access information on IT systems? Several experts I spoke with this week narrowed the reasons to three: size, cost and culture.
Stay tuned on all three. Size and cost are coming down. Culture is less predictable. Could ROI be a useful proxy? The article gets to this question eventually. Read the whole thing.
Mobile technology is crying out for better user authentication. Fingerprints would seem like a good match, but there’s a hardware chicken-and-egg problem: no fingerprint sensor hardware means no apps and no apps means no manufacturer has decided (long-term) to drive up the cost of their handset to provide a feature few may use.
That means biometric app developers interested in verification using mobile devices have concentrated on modalities that can use the sensors that are already ubiquitous in mobile hardware.
A phone without a microphone isn’t a phone anymore so the developers of voice biometrics are in pretty good shape. And though a camera isn’t a strictly necessary feature on a mobile device, they all seem to have them. That invites facial recognition, and eye-based biometrics developers into the mobile world.
All three (face, eye, voice) face challenges.
Scan Eyes to unlock spartphones (PSFK)
If I’m reading this article correctly, or more accurately making the correct inference from the picture that accompanies it*, EyeVerify seems to be side-stepping the challenges associated with iris biometrics and camera resolution by switching to an analysis of sclera vasculation — the veins on the white part — for mobile verification.
That’s pretty cool.
See also:
Mobile Devices and Biometric Modalities
* According to the EyeVerify site, that was the correct inference.