Eagle-Eyes: A System for Iris Recognition at a Distance

In recent years the human iris has established itself as a robust, highly accurate biometric. Academic research of iris biometrics is expanding and several iris recognition products have become commercially available. Conventional iris recognition systems impose constraints with regard to a subjects proximity to the device as well as their movement. Recent innovations in iris acquisition systems and recognition algorithms have aimed to relax these constraints. This paper discusses the design of a novel prototype iris recognition system for long-range human identification. Eagle-Eyes™ is a multi-biometric system that is capable of acquiring, a face and two iris images from multiple humans present anywhere within its large capture volume. Eagle-Eyes uses multiple cameras with hierarchically-ordered field of views, a highly precise pan- tilt unit and a long focal length zoom lens. This solution performs enrollment, acquisition and processing of iris biometrics using a device and data agnostic architecture. Preliminary experimental results are reported.