From an article in Tech Digest, I see that British company xVista “has developed the U.K.’s first portable iris scanning and verification system which is small enough to fit into a standard camera phone (see left), creating the possibility of handheld security devices in airports and for secure financial transactions on mobile devices.”
The software scans and maps the iris’ characteristics and the image can be transmitted to a central computer database for security checks in the future, the company’s Web site says.
“A standard, 256 Mb mobile phone memory card will be able to hold over 250,000 separate iris templates and from a database of 1,000,000 irises, it will take less than one second for it to verify an individual iris,” xVista says.
Accuracy compared to other methods
The company says the chances of two irises matching is about one in seven million. Tests by the U.K. passport service in 2005 found that scanning irises was the most accurate type of biometric security with a 96 percent success rating, the company says.
This compares to an 81 percent accuracy for fingerprints and 69 percent for facial recognition.
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