IRIS RECOGNITION BORDER-CROSSING SYSTEM IN THE UAE

For the past three years, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has employed an iris recognition system for all passengers arriving in the UAE by land, sea or air. By looking at an iris camera for a second or two while passing through immigration control, each passenger's iris patterns are encoded mathematically and the resulting image is sent over a distributed communications network to a central database where they are compared with the images from 420,000 people who were expelled from the UAE for various violations. Less than one second is required for each image to be compared against the full database. More than 9,500 people have been caught traveling with forged identities by this system. This article describes the system in detail, including the critical features of the system architecture and the algorithm for encoding and comparing iris patterns. The system operates in an "all against all" identification search mode. The decision thresholds are automatically adjusted according to the size of the enrolled database and thus the number of comparisons performed, so that there is no net accumulation of probability of false matches. This makes the system extremely efficient and accurate. All of the matches made so far between arriving passengers and violators in the database have been confirmed by other records.