Tag Archives: iris

Noah Kalina Everyday and NIST Face and Iris Testing

(Image By Noah Kalina – https://flickr.com/photos/arvadacenter/7205535002/, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69354953)

When the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) performs biometric testing, it generally uses government data from law enforcement, homeland security, and similar sources.

Plus some specialized data that government databases can’t match.

On January 10, 2000, Noah Kalina took a selfie. The next day, he took another. And he kept on doing it every day, with some exceptions, for many years. (Here he is on June 1, 2026.) By centering his nose in the center of the frame, the pictures provide a consistent chronicle of Kalina’s appearance, along with the exact day on which the pictures were taken. NIST purchased rights to some of these photos to use in its age estimation testing. Since NIST knew Kalina’s true age on any given day, it could measure an age estimation algorithm’s accuracy.

But that’s not why I’m writing about Noah Kalina.

Let’s move to irises

Consider the irises of the face, how they are captured. They are usually captured with expensive cameras that take a picture from a short distance away.

But what if a normal camera captured a person, and their irises? Could the camera images yield useful information?

James Matey wanted to find out.

[The Kalina images] “provide us with interesting opportunities to explore the effects of time lapse on iris recognition employed on images that were not originally intended for iris recognition. NIST obtained a license from Kalina to use a subset (7 half years from 2009-2015) of original, high resolution, digital images in biometric studies.”

So were they useful?

“…even though the majority of the images in this dataset did not provide solid matches, there are instances where mated iris image pairs from visible light images that were not obtained for the purpose of iris recognition match with match scores corresponding to a false match rate of 0:1% at a true accept rate of 1% . Though such performance is not useful in applications such as access control, there are cases where it may be useful.”

No, your irises can’t be easily captured in 2026, but what about later?

Proof of Humanity Does Not Prove Identity

If you have a database of people worldwide, you can use irises to see whether someone is in the database or not.

This lets you buy the world a Coke. One per person.

But it doesn’t tell you WHO they are.

For that you need to test them against the factors of identity verification and authentication.

All six of them.

Learn more. Purchase the ebook.

Four pages from "Proving Humanity: The Six Factors of Identity Verification and Authentication" by John E. Bredehoft, Bredemarket. Click on the image to purchase.
Proving Humanity: The Six Factors of Identity Verification and Authentication.

Trying to Fly Without REAL ID: Today’s Phrase is “Orbital Blowout Fracture”

Don’t get violent at a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) checkpoint. If you do, you may not fly anywhere…or drive or walk anywhere either.

Here’s the story of a man named Idress Vinay Solomon who was preparing to board a Southwest Airlines flight from Dallas’ Love Field to Oakland on March 10. Somehow Mr. Solomon missed the memo that you need a REAL ID or equivalent to board a plane. Something that has been discussed for decades, since passage of the Real ID Act of 2005.

But as readers of the Bredemarket blog know, despite years of declarations that you must have a REAL ID to fly, you don’t need one. The TSA launched ConfirmID this year, an alternate identity confirmation service for those who don’t have approved identity documentation. You pay $45, and TSA confirms your identity via other methods.

Or tries to.

In Solomon’s case, ConfirmID didn’t work either.

Solomon was not happy.

“[T]he Oakland resident allegedly started reacting aggressively and attacked the officers present. During this incident, he punched a [Dallas Police Department] officer multiple times, resulting in the officer suffering an “orbital blowout fracture” in his left eye.”

U.S. Department of Justice.

For those of us who aren’t health professionals, the Cleveland Clinic explains what an orbital blowout fracture is.

“A blowout fracture is the most common type of orbital fracture. This fracture is a break along the floor or thin inner wall of your eye socket. Getting hit in the eye with something like a fist or a baseball most often causes blowout fractures.”

The Cleveland Clinic does not indicate whether iris identification is affected by blunt force trauma.

But let’s return to “Love” Field.

The police officer was hospitalized, and Solomon remains in custody. If convicted, he could face up to 20 years in federal prison, as confirmed by the Department of Justice.

“Violent conduct perpetrated against TSA and law enforcement officers will never be tolerated in the Northern District of Texas,” said U.S. Attorney Ryan Raybould.  “We will prosecute such offenses to the fullest extent to seek justice for the victims here and to deter others from resorting to aggressive attacks against officers responsible for ensuring the public’s safety while traveling.”

Just get the REAL ID, folks.

Daugman

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.

When Everyone Goes Multimodal: Iris ID and Faces

I’ve previously discussed the difference between the terms “multimodal” and “multifactor.”

Multimodal is often (though not exclusively) used to discuss the use of different biometric modalities. For example, when Motorola’s Biometric Business Unit was acquired, we joined an organization (Sagem Morpho) that specialized in three biometric modalities: finger, face, and iris.

From Sandeep Kumar, A. Sony, Rahul Hooda, Yashpal Singh, in Journal of Advances and Scholarly Researches in Allied Education | Multidisciplinary Academic Research, “Multimodal Biometric Authentication System for Automatic Certificate Generation.”

As you can imagine, the “which biometric is best” wars simply do not apply to the multimodal folks. Unlike someone committed to tongue biometrics because that’s all they do, a multimodal biometric vendor can say “this one’s best here, this other one’s best there.”

So I was a bit surprised to see the recent Biometric Update article, “Iris ID debuts in NIST FRTE 1:1.”

  • Iris ID is known for…well, irises.
  • FRTE is a face test.

I had some catching up to do.

After all, I was aware of the history of Iris ID (yet another New Jersey iris company) and its spinoff from LG, and although I don’t think I’ve ever met Mohammad Murad, I’ve certainly heard of him.

But Iris ID has branched off from just irises. Here’s what it exhibited at Identity Week America in September 2025:

“Highlighted in the Iris ID booth are the latest advances in multi-modal biometric technology, where iris and face recognition are combined in fully contactless solutions. These innovations are designed to deliver fast, frictionless throughput while ensuring accuracy and reliability, even in high-throughput environments.”

For what it’s worth, the Iris ID “001” algorithm tested in NIST FRTE 1:1 wasn’t an overwhelming world-beater, not even cracking the top 100 in any of NIST’s many, many categories (the best performance was in BORDER:BORDER).

But everyone has to start somewhere.

Just don’t get eyes and faces confused.

A biometric product marketing writer can help.

On Melanin

If you’re examining a person’s fingerprints, palm prints, face, and irises, you need to understand melanin.

The Cleveland Clinic goes into great detail on melanin, but for now I’m going to concentrate on one item.

There are three types of melanin, two of which affect the skin, eyes, and hair.

Eumelanin. There are two types of eumelanin: black and brown. Eumelanin is responsible for dark colors in skin, eyes and hair. People with brown or black hair have varying amounts of brown and black eumelanin. When there’s no black eumelanin and a small amount of brown eumelanin, it results in blonde hair.

Pheomelanin. This type of melanin pigments your lips, nipples and other pinkish parts of your body. People who have equal parts eumelanin and pheomelanin have red hair.

Melanin obviously affects the coloration of your skin, although some parts of your body (such as your fingertips) may have less melanin than other parts (such as your face).

Concentrating on fingertips and faces (and ignoring irises for the moment), let’s look at a situation where we use an optical mechanism (such as an optical fingerprint reader or a camera), along with available illumination, to photograph fingers and faces of people with varying skin tones.

But what if your entire photographic system is based upon reference materials optimized for light melanin levels? As late as the 1970s, Kodak’s reference materials, called “Shirley cards” after the first model, used to exclusively white people.

In the 1970s, photographer Jim Lyon joined Kodak’s first photo tech division and research laboratories. He says the company recognized there was a problem with the all-white Shirley cards.

“I started incorporating black models pretty heavily in our testing, and it caught on very quickly,” he says. “It wasn’t a big deal, it just seemed like this is the right thing to do. I wasn’t attempting to be politically correct. I was just trying to give us a chance of making a better film, one that reproduced everybody’s skin tone in an appropriate way.”

So hopefully today optical devices are properly capturing fingers, faces, and irises of people at all melanin levels.

Or is this wishful thinking?

Retinal Identification

First, the iris and the retina are not synonymous.

NIH National Eye Institute, Public Domain. Link.

Second, while the iris can be used for biometric identification, so can the retina. People are identified by their blood vessels in their eyes. But there are complications, according to the Biometrics Institute:

“Retina recognition is one of the most accurate biometric applications but a number of common eye conditions and diseases (for example, cataracts, diabetes, glaucoma) can affect the arrangement of the blood vessels and consequently alter the pattern used for biometric recognition.”