Editing Iris recognition (section)

==History==
Although [[John Daugman]] developed and in the 1990s patented the first actual algorithms to perform iris recognition, published the first papers about it and gave the first live demonstrations, the concept behind this invention has a much longer history and today it benefits from many other active scientific contributors. In a 1953 clinical textbook, F.H. Adler<ref>Adler, F.H., <CITE>Physiology of the Eye</CITE> (Chapter VI, page 143), Mosby (1953)</ref> wrote: <CITE>"In fact, the markings of the iris are so distinctive that it has been proposed to use photographs as a means of identification, instead of fingerprints."</CITE> Adler referred to comments by the British ophthalmologist J.H. Doggart,<ref>Doggart, J.H., <CITE>Ocular Signs in Slit-Lamp Microscopy</CITE>, Kimpton (1949), page 27</ref> who in 1949 had written that: <CITE>"Just as every human being has different fingerprints, so does the minute architecture of the iris exhibit variations in every subject examined. [Its features] represent a series of variable factors whose conceivable permutations and combinations are almost infinite."</CITE> Later in the 1980s, two American ophthalmologists, L. Flom and [[Aran Safir]] managed to patent Adler's and Doggart's conjecture that the iris could serve as a human identifier, but they had no actual algorithm or implementation to perform it and so their patent remained conjecture. The roots of this conjecture stretch back even further: in 1892 the Frenchman A. Bertillon had documented nuances in <CITE>"Tableau de l'iris humain"</CITE>. Divination of all sorts of things based on iris patterns goes back to ancient Egypt, to Chaldea in Babylonia, and to ancient Greece, as documented in stone inscriptions, painted ceramic artefacts, and the writings of Hippocrates. (Iris divination persists today, as "[[iridology]]."){{Citation needed|date=August 2023}}

The core theoretical idea in Daugman's algorithms is that the <CITE>failure</CITE> of a test of [[statistical independence]] can be a very strong basis for pattern recognition, if there is sufficiently high entropy (enough degrees-of-freedom of random variation) among samples from different classes. In 1994 he patented this basis for iris recognition and its underlying computer vision algorithms for image processing, feature extraction, and matching, and published them in a paper.<ref>Daugman, J., "High confidence visual recognition of persons by a test of statistical independence", <CITE>IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence</CITE>, 15 (11), pp 1148-1161 (1993)</ref> These algorithms became widely licensed through a series of companies: IriScan (a start-up founded by Flom, Safir, and Daugman), Iridian, Sarnoff, Sensar, LG-Iris, Panasonic, Oki, BI2, IrisGuard, Unisys, Sagem, Enschede, Securimetrics and L-1, now owned by French company [[Morpho (Safran)|Morpho]].

With various improvements over the years, these algorithms remain today the basis of all significant public deployments of iris recognition, and they are consistently top performers in NIST tests (implementations submitted by L-1, MorphoTrust and [[Morpho (Safran)|Morpho]], for whom Daugman serves as Chief Scientist for Iris Recognition).  But research on many aspects of this technology and on alternative methods has exploded, and today there is a rapidly growing academic literature on optics, photonics, sensors, biology, genetics, ergonomics, interfaces, decision theory, coding, compression, protocol, security, mathematical and hardware aspects of this technology.

Most flagship deployments of these algorithms have been at airports, in lieu of passport presentation, and for security screening using watch-lists.  In the early years of this century, major deployments began at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport and at ten UK airport terminals allowing frequent travellers to present their iris instead of their passport, in a programme called <CITE>IRIS:  Iris Recognition Immigration System.</CITE>  Similar systems exist along the [[Canada–United States border|US / Canada border]], and many others.  In the United Arab Emirates, all 32 air, land, and seaports deploy these algorithms to screen all persons entering the UAE requiring a visa.  Because a large watch-list compiled among GCC States is exhaustively searched each time, the number of iris cross-comparisons climbed to 62 trillion in 10 years.  The [[Government of India]] has enrolled the iris codes (as well as fingerprints) of more than 1.2 billion citizens in the [[UIDAI]] (Unique Identification Authority of India) programme for national ID and fraud prevention in entitlements distribution.<ref name="portal.uidai.gov.in"/> In a different type of application, iris is one of three biometric identification technologies internationally standardised since 2006 by [[International Civil Aviation Organization|ICAO]] for use in e-passports (the other two are fingerprint and face recognition).<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.icao.int/publications/Documents/9303_p9_cons_en.pdf|title=ICAO Document 9303: Machine Readable Travel Documents, Part 9: Deployment of Biometric Identification and Electronic Storage of Data in eMRTDs, 7th edition|date=2015}}</ref>