Recently, there were reports on iris solutions being deployed at end user entities, with owners of these entities touting the accuracy of the technology. However, notwithstanding iris’s superior identification technology, it is by no means perfect and still has its shortcomings and limitations.
Recently, there were reports on iris solutions being deployed at end user entities, with owners of these entities touting the accuracy of the technology.
In fact, experts do agree that accuracy is the hallmark of iris. During IFSEC, SRI International, a biometrics solutions provider, told us that a single iris has 250 points for identification and 500 for two, and false accept is one in 1.4 million for one and 1 in 1.4 trillion for both irises.
Larry Reed, CEO of ZKAccess, echoes that sentiment. “Although any biometric technology can be designed to capture more data points from the image and FAR rates are often not measured by independent third-party governing biometrics authorities, it is widely accepted that iris recognition is considered more reliable than face recognition due to the increased data points used in iris-matching,” he said.
However, notwithstanding iris’s superior identification capability, it is by no means perfect and still has its shortcomings and limitations. Specifically, it is limited by its reading range: since irises are tiny organs, reading them from a long distance becomes difficult. So the user has to stand extremely close to the reader, and that presents a “user interaction” challenge.
“In the past, iris recognition was very invasive. Users literally needed to press their face against an iris reader for it to work,” Reed said, adding that the technology is further limited by the consumer’s perception that iris recognition is somewhat invasive and can cause physical harm to ones’ eyes. “In business of course, consumer perception is reality regardless of validity, or lack thereof,” he said.
More and more, the technology has improved, now enabling a much more comfortable reading range. But that comes with a price, literally. “No surprise though, there is a higher price tag associated with these longer-range iris readers,” Reed said. “So regarding ‘iris,’ the primary weakness or limitation today is the relatively steep price tag itself.”
According to him, when compared with iris, facial recognition, which ZKAccess offers, presents a much less invasive solution. “Face readers on the other hand are perceived as much more comfortable for users to interact with on both a physical and psychological level,” he said. “Face recognition is also perceived as more user friendly (hands-free) when compared to other biometric methodologies which require actual contact (that is, fingerprint, finger-vein and hand-geometry).”
Facial recognition does have its limitations too. Its reading capability is reduced when, for example, the light is too bright or when the person is not directly looking at the camera. Those problems however have been improved as well, due to 3D facial recognition which does not depend on pose and illumination, and therefore the representation of the object does not change with those parameters.
So what is the ideal biometrics solution? According to Reed, that depends on the user’s budget and type of business. “If you’re safeguarding airport planes and passengers and can’t risk creating backlogs of people standing in line at the security check point, perhaps a significant investment in long-range iris recognition makes most sense. However if you’re a typical small business needing only to restrict door access to employees and frequent visitors, typically an inexpensive fingerprint or face reader is all you need, if you’re concerned your card-based access control reader can be too easily compromised,” he said.