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Video: Intel ISEF – Cheap, effective and safe iris scanning

Iris scanning and its dependence on laser light may be useful as another factor of biometric security, but it’s expensive to implement. It’s also not all that healthy to be shining lasers into your eyes.

Sophia Demetriou, ISEF finalist from Selly Park Secondary School in Rustenburg, South Africa doesn’t believe it should be that way. Her entry to this year’s fair uses a conventional webcam or digital camera and the application of various filters in software to do the same thing.

Even though the project is still in the early stages of development, it’s 97% accurate (tested across a sample of 120 individuals).

To quote an extract from her  project entry:

“The iris recognition system consists of an automatic segmentation system that is based on the Hough transformer and is able to localise the circular iris and pupil region, including eyelids, eyelashes and reflections. The extracted iris region is then normalised into a rectangular block with constant dimensions to account for the imaging inconsistencies. The Gabor filter is extracted and encodes the unique patterning of the iris which is used for comparison purposes and stored in the database. In a set of 120 individuals; an overall percentage of 3% false detection incurred. Majority of false detection came from candidates with darker eye color because of the difficulty in getting a perfect reading without the use of laser technology or light emission (which could compromise eye safety).

The results of this program shows that it is accurate and is also cheap and user-friendly. The iris is one of the most reliable parts of a person to use for identification because of its properties and its uniqueness and it is not an easy body part to fraud. With further testing, accuracy may be improved but currently this prototype program runs without errors and has minimal faults.”

Colour me impressed. I caught up with her to find out more about her project and how she’s enjoyed the ISEF experience.

[Main image: Shutterstock]

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