Market maturing for eye scanning biometric tech

EYES are the windows of the soul. They are also a person’s identity, so China is embracing the biometric technology of eye scanning, or iris-recognition.

The iris is the ring between the black pupil and the white sclera on the surface of the human eye. It is one of the most unique biometric human features and remains unchanged from the age of one, said expert Tan Tieniu, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

“Compared with fingerprint and facial-recognition, irisrecognition is more reliable and stable. For example, fingerprints are prone to wear and facial recognition has difficulty distinguishing twins. The iris does not wear and is stable across a lifetime. Even twins have totally different iris details,” Tan said.

In January 1998, Tan returned to China from the UK and established an iris-recognition research team in the CAS Institute of Automation. Back then, China lagged behind many countries in this technology.

“Foreign research institutions cannot sell iris image readers to us or share with us iris images for research. We had to start from scratch and develop the technology independently,” Tan said.

After years of hard work, Tan’s team made great progress in hardware design as well as an identification algorithm. They have published more than 120 papers in international journals and conferences.

Tan said the CASIA iris image database built by his team is one of the most widely used in the world, with more than 20,000 research teams from 180 countries applying to use it.

With great progress in basic research, Tan’s team began to explore technological transformation and wider application of the technology. The Institute of Automation started a company called IrisKing in late 2006.

Ma Li, Tan’s first PhD student in iris-recognition research and CEO of IrisKing, said the technology was first applied in the mining industry.

“To improve safety, a mining company came to us in 2007 for a reliable system to identify authorized miners going underground. They said fingerprints or facial recognition sometimes failed to work because miners’ hands and faces were covered with coal dust,” Ma said.

The IrisKing system was installed in major mines across the country.

The company also developed iris-recognition products and solutions in many other sectors including banking, public security, government and access control applications.

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technologies, China has also upgraded iris-recognition technology and a growing number of startups are working in the area.

IrisKing applied its technology to a national platform to battle child-trafficking. More than 400 iris-collection spots have been set up around the country, where parents can voluntarily scan their children’s iris and put it in the database. Once a child goes missing or is found, an iris scan will quickly discover his or her identity much faster than DNA identification.

Iris-scanning is a relatively new technology. With increasing application scenarios, the technology is winning public acceptance and the market is maturing, Ma said.

According to Transparency Market Research, the global biometrics market will grow to US$23.3 billion in 2020.