The Eyes Have It in New System for Verifying People’s Identities
Imagine stepping up to an automatic teller machine that knows who you are just by eyeballing you.
In just a few blinks of your eye, a computer system verifies your identity with a hidden camera that scans the 400-some identifying features of your iris and matches them to a huge database. No match, no transaction.
Sound like science fiction? Sensar Inc. is hoping its patented IrisIdent system will soon become a very real part of people’s lives, making personal identification numbers and ATM cards obsolete.
“It has a lot of promise for the future,” says George Schneider, senior consulting engineer at Dayton, Ohio-based NCR Corp., the world’s biggest ATM maker. He said NCR has been talking with Sensar for more than a year on a possible deal.
Japan’s biggest ATM maker, Oki Electric Industry, already has signed a $28-million agreement giving Oki exclusive rights to the system in Japan. The money will help Sensar, a 4-year-old subsidiary of the David Sarnoff Research Center in Princeton, further perfect IrisIdent.
Sensar is also pursuing deals with several U.S. banks and ATM makers, Italian and German companies and government agencies such as the FBI and CIA, said Kevin B. McQuade, the company’s vice president for strategic business development.
Huntington Bancshares Inc. of Columbus, Ohio, plans to be an early test site, trying IrisIdent at a handful of ATMs in Ohio late this year.
“I suspect that there will be a significant number of institutions that will find this attractive,” says Huntington’s chief technology officer, John Voss. “I don’t know that there will be a wholesale move to it.”
Sensar has plenty of competition in the market for futuristic identification technology: voice prints, fingerprint and signature verification, hand prints, facial recognition, even retina scans.
They’re all part of the growing field of biometric identification, which uses unique physical characteristics rather than ID cards or memorized codes to confirm someone’s identity.
Already, banks in Arizona, Nevada and Texas require customers cashing checks to provide a fingerprint, according to the American Bankers Assn., which has a task force working on ways to stay ahead of criminals.
“The PIN system does work, but we’re always looking for new ways to create more secure systems,” ABA spokesman John Hall said.
Sensar’s McQuade said the IrisIdent has an advantage over other biometric identification systems because the iris, the colored part of the eye, has more unique physical characteristics than even fingerprints. The iris also does not change with age, unlike other body parts.
The latest IrisIdent prototype, tested recently on 512 Sarnoff employees, correctly identified all those enrolled in its database and rejected all others.
McQuade said IrisIdent’s error rate is 1 in 131,578, which he said is significantly lower than other biometric systems.
IrisIdent uses military targeting technology developed at Sarnoff, adapted so the hidden camera can spot a person approaching it and zoom in on the right iris immediately.
The procedure combines iris-scanning identification technology developed by partner IriScan of Mount Laurel, N.J. IriScan recently began selling its system, which requires people to put an eye several inches from its camera, for security access control.
An early version of that system impressed Frank Bouchier of the Security Systems and Technology Center at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M. In his tests, it had no false identifications and less than 5% false rejections, with many of those failures linked to people wearing dirty or extremely thick eyeglasses.
“It’s a very secure system,” Bouchier said.
The system is designed to work through most glasses, contact lenses and even many sunglasses, but Bouchier said it may have difficulty scanning very dark eyes.
Bouchier and the ABA’s Hall noted that IrisIdent is less intrusive than systems requiring people to give a fingerprint or handprint. But they said IrisIdent’s potential for everyday use will depend on consumer acceptance and price.
The initial price, estimated at $5,000, may be high for ATMs, which sell for $25,000 to $30,000, but McQuade predicted it eventually will drop to several hundred dollars.
