Iris Recognition at a Distance

We describe experiments demonstrating the feasibility of human iris recognition at up to 10 m distance between subject and camera. The iris images of 250 subjects were captured with a telescope and infrared camera, while varying distance, capture angle, environmental lighting, and eyewear. Automatic iris localization and registration algorithms, in conjunction with a local correlation based matcher, were used to obtain a similarity score between gallery and probe images. Both the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and the Fisher Linear Discriminant were used to measure the distance between authentic and imposter distributions. Among variables studied, database wide experiments reveal no performance degradation with distance, and minor performance degradation with, in order of increasing effect, time (one month), capture angle, and eyewear.