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Public Iris Scanning Device In the Works
Nonfinity writes "A public iris scanning device has been proposed in a patent application from Sarnoff Labs in New Jersey. The device is able to scan the iris of the eye without the knowledge or consent of the person being scanned. The device uses multiple cameras, captures multiple images, and then selects the best image to process."
Damnit, someone watched Minority Report and went "Heeeeey, good idea....GET ME R&D"
Put on your tin foil hat... And sun glasses!
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Interesting to note that the article focusses on the less sinister uses for this, customised advertising, whilst bypassing any mention of privacy aside from a nod to saying it could take place "without the knowledge or participation of the subject". So whose money will talk fastest, advertisers or Homeland Security?
An excuse to wear shades in a cinema. It's the 80's all over again!
Task Mangler
Reduce, reuse, cycle
In all seriousness, I would've thought someone in London would come up with this idea first.
Blerg.
Do we know that repeated retina scanning is healthy for our eyes?
Contact lenses that alter eye color are already in popular, widespread use.
How hard would it be to construct a contact lens with a unique, fake, computer-generated iris image (no idea how you'd do that, but "fractals" sounds like a good buzzword to insert here)? Sound like it would be a lot easier than fake fingerprints.
In a situation where you knew you were being scanned, the officials might say "I see you're wearing contacts, remove them please," but I don't quite see an airport saying "no contact lenses allowed in this airport..." particular if the idea is that the scanning is supposed to be surreptitious.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
specifically about implementing something this.
Identifying who you scanned. sure you can scan an iris without their knowledge but unless you have the pattern stored how will you know who it is? Perhaps do it at a register and match it to the card/id used? That would be underhanded to say the least.
Storage, how much space per pattern? What is the speed of comparison to a large database? Something that is quick enough to focus ads (for the minority report fans) would require serious processing power.
I could see it in small settings, say a business who needs a less instrusive means of security. Scan all your employees and only let them in, if accompanied by those who cannot be matched then don't admit to sensitive areas. However in the general public setting, costs for equipment to store millions of scans and process them fast enough to be meaningful is still aways off.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I've never seen such pessimistic claims for iris recognition. With a false accept rate of 1/1000 to 1/10000, you can achieve a false accept rate of pretty much zero. I respect Simon Davies, but I'm not sure he has his facts right here.
Xenu loves you!
The article says "Good quality scans result in a 'false match' less than one time per one hundred billion."
It also says "the newly proposed system is that it allows iris scans to be taken without the knowledge or participation of the subject."
What it does not say is that "the newly proposed system allows good quality scans, with a 'false match' of less than one time per one hundred billion, to be taken without the knowledge or participation of the subject." I fancy readers are supposed to infer that conclusion, which does not follow from the premises.
I'll bet the system has the usual impressive-sounding "99.9%" accuracy or something in that ballpark... like all those facial-recognition systems. Meaning a false positive rate of one in a thousand. Meaning that if one in a million airport visitors is a known terrorist with an iris scan in the database, then 999 out of every thousand people, yanked out of the concourse by polite but firm security officials, will be Lutheran grandmothers from Davenport, Iowa travelling to visit their children in St. Paul.
And the officials will be unable to give any coherent explanation, since the system is supposed to be surreptitions.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I don't know about the rest of you, but iris scanners scare the crap out of me. Every time I look into the peephole to get scanned, I'm relatively certain a large needle will shoot out from behind the glass and stab me in the eye.
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
...is not so much that this is possible, but that the inventors seem to feel sure that there's a market in this AND that there won't be any serious objection to stop it. A bit like the proliferation of "security" (read "unadulterated snooping") cameras in London.
Actually, thinking about it, what *really* worries me is that people *won't* object to it. Not really.
Ah! Brave new world... etc.
The system had a problem with people who blinked too much. I had to sit in front of the camera and remain still and it took a picture of my eye a few times before it got a good enough image. Out of 5 people who participated, all but one had to have multiple pictures taken.
I just can't see this system being used with cameras that randomly take pictures from varying distances and work, unless the cameras and software improved quite a bit in the past two years.
Please contact lionsgate films /horror division immediately..
btw FYOU~! now I'm gonna have that same vision every time...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Which terrorist group will detonate our beloved freedom fighters with this first?
"and when I gave them cell phones, they could not get enough...
generating the database is simple, just use the network of driver's license ID cameras.
the only good news is the economics of technology mean this will be first used by high-value targets against other high-value targets. Think large-scale corporate wars vs. vengeful government agencies...with the rest of us as collateral damage.
and- which foreign state will get access to our database first?
on the other hand, think of how many more dead soldiers we will be able to recognize on the battle field! yay!
I don't know about contacts, but my glasses must do wonders for light path - astigmatism corrections (different on each eye) AND progressive bifocals AND distance corrections (different on each eye). Gotta remember to keep them pushed up the bridge of my nose, I guess.
Oh, and they're coated so as to reduce UV.
people are wearing sunglasses on a cloudy day :)
Unless the system takes advantage of people that are in close proximity to the camera to get its pictures. Think about the resolution required otherwise. Let's say we have a picture that is 2,048 x 1,536 pixels... now, can you imagine a person's irises taking up more than 1% of the width of the picture, unless it were a rather close "headshot" type pose? Now, take a look at some closeup shots of human irises. How much information do you think you'll get from 20 x 15 pixels?
Now, instead of 3 megapixels, think 12. That's still only 40 x 30 pixels. Not enough.
I'll worry when 100 megapixels becomes commonly available. (Yes I know the Navy has a 111 megapixel CCD).
I foresee a new market developing for iris-concealing contact lenses.
The constant monitoring, surveillance, identification, numbering and tagging of people in our society is an affront to human dignity. It's an affront not only to those being numbered and tagged, though they are the ones most offended, it's also a stain on the dignity of any state that permits it. Anyone who disagrees should ask people who have been tagged, with a barcode.
But the interesting fact is, human dignity is not a universally recognised right. We've got rights to our property, lives and liberty, but not in most cases to our dignity. This is only something that has recently been awknowladged.
The word "dignity" dows not even appear in the US constitution(enacted 1787). US citizens do not have a constitutional right to it. The Irish constitution(enacted 1937) does mention in the preamble that it is being adopted in part "...so that the dignity and freedom of the individual may be assured". But this is only in the preamble.
Interestingly, the constitution of South Africa (enacted 1996), explicitly and unabiguously guarantees a right to dignity in Chapter 2: Section 10: I guess decades of having their dignity denied to them taught South Africans that this right doesn't really go without saying. This is one ammendment I would dearly love to see in my country's constitution. (Actually the SA constitution also guarantees the right to privacy and even the right to private communications. It's an extremely progressive document which unfortunately hasn't influenced older constitutions in the way that it should.)
Privacy in public is obviously a fallacy. But we should at least not have to suffer affronts to our dignity by being scanned and checked at every turn, or have our clothing seen through at every security checkpoint. Laws forcing Jews to wear stars or Muslims to wear crescents would probably still be constitutional in a lot of countries. A dignity ammendment would make what we know is wrong explicitly wrong. Humans aren't like animals. We have more needs than simply life, liberty and property. Dignity is one of those other needs.
May the Maths Be with you!
Current systems only have a name in the database.
What makes you think that the new system will have pictures, a name and a text description when the current system only has one of them?
Putting a "right to dignity" in your constitution is either:
a) A sign that the constitution will be applied in a very limited fashion, I.e. more as a nice-sounding statement of intent with very limited legal day-to-day application. I suspect this is the case in South Africa.
b) A legal train-wreck waiting to happen. Applying a legal concept of "a right to dignity" in practice makes many other infamous slippery legal issues seem easy by comparison. Expect a constantly changing (according to legal and political fashions) defintion of "dignity". What is certain is only that many new, cool "constitutional" concepts will emerge from the penumbra of dignity.
Why? Simply because there is hardly any consensus whatsoever as to what "dignity" means in many relevant situations - it's fuzzy beyond belief. I recently visited London for a few days, and was no doubt recorded by hundreds of CCTV cameras. Did I consider it a blow to my dignity? Not really. To you on the other hand, CCTV recordings appear to constitute a severe blow to your dignity. Which sort of illustrates my point.
The worse problem, when you think about it, is the number of persons that are going to be scanned.
E.g., let's say you stick this in an airport, and give it an insane resolution camera. You want to identify suspects quickly in a crowd, right? So if this thing is this good at scanning people without even having them look in a gizmo, better batch scan any iris that has enough pixels on that camera, right?
The problem there is that there'll be maybe a thousand people in any place in the airport at a time, so around 10 of them will be falsely identified. That's just in one scanning everyone in the room.
Now think the hundreds of thousands of people moved by a reasonable airport daily, their families coming with them to the airport, etc. Oooer. Now that's some serious false positives.
Multiply this by a a generous number of cameras scattered all over the place. A 1 false match in 100 scans pretty much means just that: if you take the same person and walk him past 100 cameras, on the average 1 of them will identify him as someone else. Stick enough of these cameras on an airport, and everyone will get at least one false match by just walking from one gate to another, maybe with a detour to the toilet/bar/whatever.
And I don't even want to think of the janitors, security guards, airline personnel, etc. Those are going to get scanned again and again thousands of times a day, producing anywhere between tens and hundreds of false matches each.
Basically: think of the worst "the Pope, Bush and Osama walk onto a plane" joke and a camera somewhere will produce exactly that kind of false match. Daily.
Now for the second problem: picture being placed somewhere at the scene of a crime by such a false match. 99% accuracy sounds just about guaranteed to have been you to the average jurror.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
-b.
http://www.sarnoff.com/products_services/governmen t_solutions/homeland_security/iris.asp
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!