Slashdot Mirror
Iris Recognition To Take Off
An anonymous reader writes "Looks like iris recognition is about to explode. Turns out, a major patent held by iris recognition leader Iridian is expiring, and that's leading a stampede of start-ups and VCs into this space."
A patent exipry causing a boom in company startups and innovation - say it ain't so. Are there any legislators out there paying attention to stories like this?
Such insight...
Companies will not invest in the necessary R&D without some guarantee of exclusivity for some period of time.
But you knew that -- you're just bitter.
Are we talking Iris or Retina here?
Because I've never heard of using the Iris and don't know anything about its uniqueness. Where the retina is easily scanned and heavily researched.
Anybody know more? or is this a typo?
problem: a $5000 DSLR with zoom lens could capture an iris from across the street.
i would prefer that it cost more than $5000 to steal smallpox virus
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Iris scanning proves beyond a reasonable doubt that your eye matches information in a row in a database. The information in that row may or may not match you.
Here you go: Malaysia car thieves steal finger
With better scanners that can tell the difference between live and dead fingers, this might have been prevented. Of course, that would depend on the bad guys knowing that it wouldn't work...
Does your application handle + characters in e-mail addresses? (RFC2822)
Moving past the a.h. attack...
These small companies -- why wouldn't they just patent the results of their efforts? Why exactly do patent laws favor size? I have a small number of patents that I paid for as an individual. They aren't going to make me millions, but submitting and getting a patent doesn't have any size barrier(s).
So seriously, what was your point?
for example, an untreated diabetics' eyes show some filaments that will disappear when he starts geting treatment.
And diabetes is only one disease which affects the patterns which can be detected in the iris. Many other diseases affect both the radial disposition and the radial pattern. The medical books are filled with disease effects on the eyes.
While iris scanning for recognition is useless, it IS extremely useful as a diagnostic tool in medecine.
For personal identification, you would want to scan the blood vessels in the retina. Those are relatively more stable under a wider range of biological conditions.
But the eyes is a bag of watery tissue. Its subject to varying degrees deformation under a wide variety of physical and bioogical conditions.
How would you like to be refused admision to your work place when all you did was eat some food containing some mono sodium glutemate for lunch? It that easy to screw your patterns.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
What I want is a fingerprint scanner, where you have to scan all your fingers, but the order you put your fingers on the pads would be a sort of 'pin code,' which you could change. Make all fingerprint scanners be sold with a protective hood, so nobody can see what order you use. If some criminal ever chops off your hand, just use the other one to phone in (or use voice dial), to change the pin before then can buy a TV.
You have the security of revocability, but the convenience of never accidentally losing your "card" (except in extreme cases of accident.)
One of the more broadly applicable studies, performed for the UK Passport Office (reports downloadable from http://www.passport.gov.uk/publications.asp) with just over 10,000 participants, found that 1 in 10 British Citizens were unable to even successfully enroll their iris patterns into the system. And afterwards, the system couldn't confirm that 5% of the participants were still the same person.
A facial recognition system was even less reliable, but nevertheless the goverment is going ahead with deployment in every passport.
Taxation without representation is tyranny! Statehood for DC, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands & Pacific Territories!
Even if the bits did come from the proper sensor, it may be not be seeing what it thinks it is seeing. An interesting property of inverse optics is that it is unsolvable: while there is only one way any given scene can produce an image on a given camera, an infinite number of scenes could have produced any given camera image. Imagine long objects that happen to be viewed end-on, rows of objects that happen to be lined up directly behind one another, objects pigmented to obscure or simulate spurious edges, various disguises, perspective tricks, and the rest of the optical illusionist's bag of tricks. Our own eyes, and the cameras they lead us to design, must make the assumption that the world is (usually) not deliberately trying to fool us. Security devices need to be more careful.
The whole article basically sums up why patents don't work as intended. And I'm not talking about software patents, all patents. This field could have been huge 10 years ago, generating billions of dollars and furthering innovation. The supposed purpose of patents is to foster innovation and invention, alas, patents just stymie innovation for 20 years until they expire.
If as I've said before patents lasted 3 years, maybe 5 at the very most, they would probably be a good thing, in 3 years Iridian would have been able to establish itself as a market leader, and every newcomer to the field would most likely license their stuff anyway (under copyright, or some other license generated by the company). Instead it takes 20 years to get an iris scanner on my laptop, or built into a security system at my house? Those things should have been done in 92.