Back in July 2023 I wrote a post about irises that referred to the last name “Daugman” a lot. With reason. The following paragraphs are adapted from that post.
Why use irises rather than, say, fingerprints and faces? The best person to answer this is John Daugman. (At this point several of you are intoning, “John Daugman.” With reason. He’s the inventor of iris recognition.)
Here’s an excerpt from John Daugman’s 2004 paper on iris recognition:
(I)ris patterns become interesting as an alternative approach to reliable visual recognition of persons when imaging can be done at distances of less than a meter, and especially when there is a need to search very large databases without incurring any false matches despite a huge number of possibilities. Although small (11 mm) and sometimes problematic to image, the iris has the great mathematical advantage that its pattern variability among different persons is enormous.
Daugman, John, “How Iris Recognition Works.” IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS FOR VIDEO TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 14, NO. 1, JANUARY 2004. Quoted from page 21. (PDF)
Or in non-scientific speak, one benefit of iris recognition is that you know it is accurate, even when submitting a pair of irises in a one-to-many search against a huge database.
Daugman died the year after I wrote my 2023 post, but his biography and accomplishments are listed here.
Daugman received A.B. and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard University and taught there before joining Cambridge University, where he was Professor of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. He also held chairs at universities in Europe and Japan. His honors included the Information Technology Award of the British Computer Society, and the OBE, Order of the British Empire.
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