The importance of being random: statistical principles of iris recognition

摘要

The statistical variability that is the basis of iris recognition is analysed in this paper using new large databases. The principle underlying the recognition algorithm is the failure of a test of statistical independence on iris phase structure encoded by multi-scale quadrature wavelets. Combinatorial complexity of this phase information across different persons spans about 249 degrees-of-freedom and generates a discrimination entropy of about 3.2bits/mm2 over the iris, enabling real-time identification decisions with great enough accuracy to support exhaustive searches through very large databases. This paper presents the results of 9.1 million comparisons among several thousand eye images acquired in trials in Britain, the USA, Japan and Korea.