The 21st century is all about privacy, and iris recognition technology has emerged as a more secure alternative to traditional passwords and fingerprinting. While the technology’s high accuracy and unique, unchanging patterns provide added security, it also has drawbacks in terms of environmental factors and ease of use. There are high hopes for iris recognition to become a mainstay of future security technologies.
The 21st century is all about privacy. As the information society evolves, protecting personal privacy is more important than ever. In the past, a simple password consisting of numbers or alphabets was enough to protect sensitive personal information, but as cybercrime has become more sophisticated and various hacking techniques have emerged, security technology has had to evolve accordingly. This is where biometrics came into play. Thanks to advances in science and technology, we now have more secure ways to protect our personal information, and biometrics is one of the most secure.
The most common biometric currently in use is the fingerprint. Fingerprints are widely used to verify identity in a variety of situations, including immigration and driver’s licenses. However, fingerprint recognition has some drawbacks. Fingerprints can be vulnerable to external damage, and there have also been concerns about the possibility of fingerprint manipulation and criminal misuse. Iris recognition technology has emerged to overcome these issues. Iris recognition offers more security than traditional fingerprint recognition and is now increasingly being used in high-security locations such as airports, research labs, and government agencies. Since 2016, iris recognition has been available on some smartphones, making it a technology that we can easily use in our daily lives.
How does iris recognition work? First, the iris is the tissue around the pupil of the eye that controls the amount of light entering the eye by adjusting the size of the pupil. The iris works like an aperture on a camera, making the pupil smaller in bright environments and larger in darker ones. What’s even more interesting is that iris information is formed early in life and never changes. Even the irises of the left and right eyes of the same person have different shapes, which is why iris recognition is gaining traction as a security technology.
The process of iris recognition is as follows First, the eye is photographed using a dim infrared light to obtain a digital image of the iris’s complex pattern. The camera minimizes the light reflected from the cornea so that the iris pattern is clearly recorded. The image is then converted into digital data, which is then mathematically processed to extract the unique features of the individual. This is called a “digital template,” and the iris recognition system stores this template in a database, which is then compared to the user’s iris information to verify their identity.
Iris recognition technology is also starting to find its way into cell phones. The Galaxy Note7, which debuted in 2016, was the first smartphone to feature iris recognition and garnered a lot of attention. To implement iris recognition, Samsung installed a dedicated camera and infrared LED on the top of the device. Since the recognition rate can vary depending on the color of the iris and the surrounding environment in normal visible light, the infrared LED was used to more accurately recognize the iris pattern. This technology has gradually evolved and is now being used in a wide range of smartphones, further enhancing user privacy and security.
The advantages of iris recognition are numerous. First, the iris is located deep within the eyelid and eyeball, making it less likely to be damaged and less affected by the external environment. Second, the iris has a unique pattern that is unique to each individual, allowing it to identify people with a high degree of accuracy without physical contact. This is a useful security measure during pandemics. Also, as mentioned earlier, the iris is formed after 18 months of age and does not change throughout life. This means that irises can be used as a more unique and immutable biometric than fingerprints. No two people have identical irises, and even identical twins have different iris patterns.
Iris recognition has a very low error rate. Compared to the 1 in 10,000 error rate of fingerprint recognition, iris recognition has an extremely low error rate of 1 in 10 million when using one eye and 1 in 1 trillion when using both eyes. And because iris recognition is based on biometric signals, it’s impossible to recognize irises from dead people or artificially created eyes. This makes it even more reliable.
However, iris recognition technology is not without its drawbacks. For example, recognition rates can drop in bright sunlight. Also, recognition becomes more difficult as the distance from the iris reader increases, and the user has to look at the iris reader precisely. Additionally, using iris recognition on a smartphone requires waking up the screen, which can be slower than fingerprint recognition.
Nevertheless, iris recognition is currently considered the safest security technology available. It is already widely used, especially in high-security applications, and the future is expected to bring even more advanced forms of biometrics. As technology advances, security is becoming an increasingly important topic in our daily lives. We are looking forward to seeing what the next generation of security technologies will look like and how they will protect our privacy.
