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Iris scanner could tell your race and gender

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G

Gaborn

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mg21228346.000-1_300.jpg


IRIS images may soon be able to do more than just verify your identity - they may confirm your race and gender too.

The iris controls the size of the pupil and gives a person's eyes their colour. It grows into a complex and unique pattern as a fetus develops and remains the same throughout a person's life. This fact has been successfully exploited in iris-based biometric systems, which work on the principle that each iris is completely different to any other.

But that is not strictly true, as Kevin Bowyer at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana and his colleagues have found. They have developed a system that can pick out similarities between irises, instead of differences. Initial tests show it can distinguish between people of two different racial backgrounds and shows promise in determining gender.

"You might assume that there is no similarity in iris texture," says Bowyer, "but you would be wrong."

In a typical iris scan, a camera snaps an image of a person's eye while it is bathed in near-infrared light. Software identifies the iris portion of the eye, and then analyses 1024 sample regions, looking for patterns in the way the delicate filaments of tissue, known as the stroma, reflect light. This unique information is then used to generate a code of binary numbers.

Bowyer's team's method adds a layer of complexity. For each of the sample regions, their software identifies features such as lines or spots in the stroma, and saves that information. It also records how brightness varies across each region.

This richer set of attributes allowed the researchers to train an algorithm to look for common features among irises of known ethnicity and gender. When they turned the system on a database of unknown irises of 1200 people, it predicted whether a person was Chinese or Caucasian with over 90 per cent accuracy, and correctly identified gender 62 per cent of the time. The team will present the research next month at the IEEE International Conference on Technologies for Homeland Security in Waltham, Massachusetts.

The reason for the low success rate in predicting gender, Bowyer says, is because the team have not yet fully worked out which textural features of the iris correspond to gender. He says that the fact that the results are better than chance means it should be possible to improve the system's ability to determine gender. The team has also not yet tested the system on people with other or more complex ethnic backgrounds.

Aside from making it difficult for people to fabricate a false identity in which they have a different gender or race, the method could speed up searches within large iris databases by reducing the data subset to be searched. It would also be possible to count the number of people belonging to different ethnic backgrounds coming into a country without recording their identity.

"It is interesting work that does fly a bit in the face of conventional thinking," says Vijayakumar Bhagavatula of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Iris patterns are generally considered to be highly random; even a person's left and right iris are different. Still, he says, "in the absence of an established biological connection between iris pattern and gender or ethnicity, there is no way to know if the features being used by Bowyer are the 'best' ones to use. There may be other features that give better prediction rates."

The iris code
Today, most commercial iris-recognition systems use an algorithm developed by John Daugman of the University of Cambridge and patented worldwide in 1992.

Daugman's insight lay in computerising a process to mathematically analyse the random patterns visible within the iris image to create a binary code called an iris code. This code is so individual to a person - even identical twins have different iris codes - that only 70 per cent of it needs to match for an iris comparison to be considered successful. The chance of a greater than 70 per cent match between two irises is less than 1 in 10 billion.
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Story Here

Really neat stuff!
 
G

Gaborn

Member
Kuro Madoushi said:
What about blasians?
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Still early technology, but the fact they got that kind of result already just shows there may very well be something there. It'll be interesting as they develop a more diverse database though.
 
G

Gaborn

Member
polyh3dron said:
remember the angry people that got mad at WiiFit for saying they were overweight? What happens when this kid grows up and gets their iris scanned?
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Potentially exactly what she wants and expects. Note the article title said "gender" not sex. Perhaps there are masculine/feminine differences in the iris we don't understand currently.
 
P

polyh3dron

Banned
Gaborn said:
Potentially exactly what she wants and expects. Note the article title said "gender" not sex. Perhaps there are masculine/feminine differences in the iris we don't understand currently.
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I don't care how much hormone therapy someone has, it's not changing the chromosomes in their DNA.
 
K

Kinyou

Member
polyh3dron said:
I don't care how much hormone therapy someone has, it's not changing the chromosomes in their DNA.
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The machine isn't scanning the DNA. I just makes elaborated guesses based on the iris.

Though since:

The iris controls the size of the pupil and gives a person's eyes their colour. It grows into a complex and unique pattern as a fetus develops and remains the same throughout a person's life.
Click to expand...
it wont change no matter what you do.
 
V

viciouskillersquirrel

Member
polyh3dron said:
remember the angry people that got mad at WiiFit for saying they were overweight? What happens when this kid grows up and gets their iris scanned?
Click to expand...
Presumably, your iris patterns, like your fingerprints and hand digit ratios, are set in the womb and don't change over time. That kid would be read by the machine as a white (?) male regardless of what the identified as.

What about Hispanic people? We're a mix of everyone.
 
G

Gaborn

Member
polyh3dron said:
I don't care how much hormone therapy someone has, it's not changing the chromosomes in their DNA.
Click to expand...

It doesn't mention chromosomes or DNA. In fact one of the most interesting things for me is the article talked about identifying GENDER rather than sex. Sex is essentially your genitalia and your chromosomes. People can have a variety of masculine and feminine characteristics though.
 
S

Souldriver

Member
polyh3dron said:
I don't care how much hormone therapy someone has, it's not changing the chromosomes in their DNA.
Click to expand...
It could also be that the boy already has "female looking" irises, so that the machine identifies him as female.
 
P

polyh3dron

Banned
Kinyou said:
The machine isn't scanning the DNA. I just makes elaborated guesses based on the iris.

Though since:


it wont change no matter what you do.
Click to expand...
My point was that someone's DNA is what dictates how someone's eye is formed and that no amount of hormone therapy will change its composition, just like a fingerprint.
 
E

Eyeh4wk

Member
it predicted whether a person was Chinese or Caucasian with over 90 per cent accuracy, and correctly identified gender 62 per cent of the time.
Click to expand...

I'd have thought it would be easier to guess the gender rather than the ethnicity of a person.
 
G

Gaborn

Member
polyh3dron said:
My point was that someone's DNA is what dictates how someone's eye is formed and that no amount of hormone therapy will change its composition, just like a fingerprint.
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Do we know that DNA determines how the eye is formed? I mean, color yes. But I think what they're actually scanning is more akin to fingerprints. Unique and individual.
 
S

Shanadeus

Banned
Eyeh4wk said:
I'd have thought it would be easier to guess the gender rather than the ethnicity of a person.
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Really?
Going by common sense, different ethnicitities are more likely to have different looking eyes than males compared to females overall.
 
S

SCULLIBUNDO

Banned
So this is how my procrastination went for the past half an hour.

Read this thread - post a Minority Report link - think about the blu - wonder when Munich is hitting blu - email Universal and Dreamworks, asking each for plans to release Munich on blu.
 
N

noah111

Still Alive
Wow, this is impressive technology. I just wonder how well it works against races that somehow have more 'similar' iris patterns. They use the white vs chinese but perhaps those patterns are the most varied as well.
 
M

mollipen

Member
polyh3dron said:
remember the angry people that got mad at WiiFit for saying they were overweight? What happens when this kid grows up and gets their iris scanned?
Click to expand...

Here's how I bet it's go:

Male (who thinks they're female) scans as male: "See, you're supposed to be a guy."
Male (who thinks they're female) scanned as female: "Meh, this proves nothing."
 
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