Meta-Analysis of Third-Party Evaluations of Iris Recognition

Iris recognition has long been widely regarded as a highly accurate biometric, despite the lack of independent, large-scale testing of its performance. Recently, however, three third-party evaluations of iris recognition were performed. This paper compares and contrasts the results of these independent evaluations. We find that despite differences in methods, hardware, and/or software, all three studies report error rates of the same order of magnitude: observed false non-match rates (FNMRs) from 0.0122 to 0.03847 at a false match rate (FMR) of 0.001. Further, the differences between the best performers' error rates are an order of magnitude smaller than the observed error rates.