1.

INTRODUCTION
Authentication and security have been major issues right from the beginning of the computer age. The emerging and efficient technique for implementing security is biometrics. In information technology, biometrics usually refers to technologies for measuring and analyzing human physiological characteristics such as fingerprints, eye retinas and irises, voice patterns, facial patterns, and hand measurements. Biometrics makes it possible to authenticate an individuals identity based on his or her unique personal characteristics. Identification and authentication (I&A) is basic to security. In I&A, identification tells the system who the user is, while authentication provides some evidence about who the real user is. Drawbacks of traditional systems: Password Systems The passwords can be guessed, stolen, or cracked. In some environments, users deliberately share passwords for their own convenience. So passwords may not be secured in such cases. A system that uses only passwords to control access cannot authenticate whether the user identified by a password is really the authorized user. Passwords are also costly to administer. Password hassles account for a significant portion of help-desk costs. Hardware token Systems Hardware tokens implement a methodology based on something you have for identification. Requiring passwords or PINs to gain access to tokens often supplements this approach. Tokens depend on one or another cryptographic technique. Portability is both a strength and weakness of hardware tokens. Though tokens are of compact size and easily pocketed and carried from one system to another they may leave them behind or miss it.
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Hardware tokens are generally at greater risk of physical damage than is typical for most computer equipment.

Biometric involves:

Verification 1:1 Rather than

Identificatio n 1:N

Fig 1: Biometric verification process

A persons live biometric data is being matched against a bioprint in the database, such as on a smart card. If it matches, it means that the person is who or she claims to be and access is granted. This process is called verification. Whereas in identification using passwords the system only cares if the password is valid one and not cared about whether the user using the password is authorized to use it. Classification of biometric: Physical biometric and behavioural characteristics are the two classifications of biometrics. The physical biometric includes

Chemical composition of body odor Facial features Features of the eye: retina iris Fingerprints
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 Hand Geometry Skin pores Wrist/hand veins The behavioural characteristics includes Handwritten signature Keystrokes/typing patterns Voiceprint.

How Biometric Systems Works? Biometric devices and systems have their own operating methodology, there are some generalizations for biometric systems implementation. The following diagram depicts the process pictorially and the accompanying notes provide a more detailed explanation.

Fig 2: Working of biometrics [A] Enrollment: The process whereby a users initial biometric sample or samples are collected, assessed, processed, and stored for ongoing use in a biometric system. These samples are referred as templates. A poor quality template will often cause considerable problems for the user, often resulting in a re-enrolment.

[B] Template storage: Template storage is an area of interest particularly with large scale applications which may accommodate many thousands of individuals. The possible options are as follows; Store the template within the biometric reader device or remotely in a central repository or on a portable token

such as a chip card. The last one is an attractive option for two reasons. Firstly, it requires no local or central storage of templates and secondly, the user carries their template with them and can use it at any authorized reader position. [C] The network. Networks may rely on the vendors systems design and message functionality, together with their own software. Or the user can himself design networking, message passing and monitoring system ,taking advantage of the recent generic biometric APIs and accessing the reader functions directly. This provides absolute flexibility and control over systems design. [D] Verification: The verification process requires the user to claim an identity by either entering a PIN or presenting a token, and then verify this claim by providing a live biometric to be compared against the claimed reference template. There will be a resulting match or no match accordingly. A record of this transaction will then be generated and stored, either locally within the device or remotely via a network and host (or indeed both). [E] Transaction storage: Some devices will store a limited number of transactions internally, scrolling over as new transactions are received. [F] The network (again): Here the network handles transactions, which is of critical importance in some applications.

1.

WHY DO WE CHOOSE IRIS SENSORS?

Compared with other biometrics such as fingerprints and face, iris recognition has great advantage in uniqueness and stableness. The human iris, an annular part between the pupil (generally appearing black in an image) and the white sclera as shown in Fig. 1.a, has an extraordinary structure and provides many interlacing minute characteristics such as freckles, coronas, stripes, furrows, crypts and so on. These visible characteristics, generally called the texture of the iris, are unique to each subject.

Figure 3: A Human iris and an eye and its parts.

The white part is the sclera, the dark disc in the center is the pupil, and the colored circle between the sclera and the pupil is the iris. The iris begins to form in the third month of gestation and is for the most part complete by the eighth month. Even though pigmentation can continue to change for months after birth, color is not important in iris recognition. What are significant are features such as furrows, ridges, rings, freckles, and other elements of the patterns that make every iris uniqueeven your two eyes are not identical to each other. Short of trauma severe enough to cause blindness, your iris patterns will never change.

3.

SCANNING AN IRIS

The iris-scan process begins with a photograph. A specialized camera, typically very close to the subject, no more than three feet, uses an infrared imager to illuminate the eye and capture a very high-resolution photograph. This process takes only one to two seconds and provides the details of the iris that are mapped, recorded and stored for future matching/verification. Eyeglasses and contact lenses present no problems to the quality of the image and the iris-scan systems test for a live eye by checking for the normal continuous fluctuation in pupil size. The inner edge of the iris is located by an iris-scan algorithm, which maps the iris' distinct patterns and characteristics. An algorithm is a series of directives that tell a biometric system how to interpret a specific problem. Algorithms have a number of steps and are used by the biometric system to determine if a biometric sample and record is a match. Iris patterns are extremely complex, carry an astonishing amount of information and have over 200 unique spots. The fact that an individual's right and left eyes are different and that patterns are easy to capture, establishes iris-scan technology as one of the biometrics that is very resistant to false matching and fraud. The false acceptance rate for iris recognition systems is 1 in 1.2 million, statistically better than the average fingerprint recognition system. The real benefit is in the falserejection rate, a measure of authenticated users who are rejected. Fingerprint scanners have a 3 percent false-rejection rate, whereas iris-scanning systems boast rates at the 0 percent level. Iris recognition is the top biometric ID technology, British researchers claim. The technology beat six other biometric systems, including facial recognition, fingerprint, and vein and voice recognition, in a study conducted by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) on behalf of the Communications Electronic Security Group.

4. WORKING OF AN IRIS SCANNER:

The Functioning of an iris sensor can observed from figure 1.b. Initially image of the eye is acquired and the image is preprocessed. Image Preprocessing mainly involves iris localization, iris normalization and iris image enhancement and denoising. After these processes are performed the Feature extraction is performed. Feature extraction uses a bank of Gabor filters to capture both local and global details in an iris as a fixed length feature vector.

Figure 4: An Iris Sensor Module

4.1 Iris normalization: Irises from different people may be captured in different size, and even for the iris from the same person, the size may change because of the variation of the illumination and other factors. Such elastic deformations in iris texture affect the results of iris matching. For the purpose of achieving more accurate recognition results, it is necessary to compensate for these deformations. Here, we anticlockwise map the iris ring to a rectangular block of texture of a fixed size (64x512). According to the requirement of feature extraction, this block is then divided into eight smaller sub images. The size of each sub image is 64x64. The result after iris Normalization is shown in Figure 2.

4.2 Iris image enhancement and denoising: The normalized iris image still has low contrast and may have non-uniform illumination caused by the position of light sources. All these may affect subsequent
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feature extraction and pattern matching. We enhance the iris image by means of local histogram equalization and remove high-frequency noise by filtering the image with a low-pass Gaussian filter. In order to obtain better-distributed texture images, the 8 sub images are separately processed. Figure 2d shows the pre-processing result of an iris image. From Fig. 2c and 2d, we can see that the method of enhancement and denoising is very effective.

4.3 Iris feature extraction: The iris has a particularly interesting structure and provides abundant texture information. So, it is desirable to explore representation methods, which can describe global and local information in an iris. We present a new representation, which can obtain both global and local information for an iris. The proposed scheme of feature extraction is to map the iris ring to a rectangular block image, which is anticlockwise, divided into eight sub images and then to analyze the 8 sub images. A feature vector consists of an ordered sequence of the features extracted from the local information contained in the 8 sub images. Thus, the feature elements capture the local information and the ordered sequence captures the invariant global relationships among the local patterns. Gabor filtering is a well-known technique in texture analysis. It can not only extract useful information in specific bandpass channels but also decompose this information into biorthogonal components in terms of spatial frequencies. We filter each sub image at different directions with different frequencies, and then obtain a feature value from each filtered sub image. A feature vector is a collection of all the features from each filtered sub image.

Gabor filtering: In recent years, Gabor filter based methods have been widely used in computer vision, especially for texture analysis. Gabor elementary functions are Gaussians modulated by sinusoidal functions. It is shown that the functional form of Gabor filters conforms closely to the receptive profiles of simple cortical cells, and Gabor filtering is an effective scheme for image representation. A two-dimensional (2D) even Gabor filter can be represented by the following equation in the spatial domain:

where f is the frequency of the sinusoidal plane wave along the direction from the xaxis, x and y are the space constants of the Gaussian envelope along x and y axes respectively. The frequency parameter f is often chosen to be of power 2. In our experiments, the central frequencies used are 2, 4, 8, 16, and 32 cycles/degree. For each central frequency f, filtering is performed at = 0, 45, 90 and 135. So, there are a total of 20 Gabor filters with different frequencies and directions. These Gabor respectively filters each sub image Filters. This leads to a total of 160 (20 for each sub image) output images from which the iris features are extracted.

4.4 Verification:

The images then captured and processed are then compared with those stored previously in the database and a confirmation signal is signaled to intimate whether the acquired image is a match or mismatch.

5. APPLICATIONS:

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1. Time Attendance 2. Access control 3. Identification card 4. Immigration checks 5. Police records, Patient management in hospitals 6. Customer identification, Loyalty programs 7. Security systems 8. Preventing identity theft 9. Membership management in clubs, libraries etc.

3. FUTURE APPLICATIONS:

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ATM machine use: Most of the leading banks have been experimenting with biometrics for ATM machine use and as a general means of combating card fraud. Workstation and network access: Many are viewing this as the application, which will provide critical mass for the biometric industry and create the transition between sci-fi device to regular systems component, thus raising public awareness and lowering resistance to the use of biometrics in general. Travel and tourism: There are multi application cards for travelers which, incorporating a biometric, would enable them to participate in various frequent flyer and border control systems as well as paying for their air ticket, hotel room, hire care etc. Telephone transactions: Many telesales and call center managers have pondered the use of biometrics.

4. REAL-TIME APPLICATIONS:

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U.K Airport Tests Passenger Eye IDs: Heathrow is the first UK airport to carry out a large-scale trial of the iris recognition technology, which examines a passenger's eye, rather than their passport as they go through immigration control. The aim is to speed up the movement of passengers through the terminal and detect illegal immigrants. Each passenger will have an image of one of his or her eye's iris stored on computer. Instead of showing their passport on arrival they will go into a kiosk where in seconds a camera will check that the pattern of their iris matches computer records. It is hoped the technology could have future security benefits, with UK airports still on alert following 11 September. The entire procedure only takes a few seconds and there is no contact with the body or with lasers or other potentially harmful light sources. Passengers taking part are being asked to carry their passports during the trial period should immigration officials want to check their details. Benefits: Increased security when controlling access to confidential data and IT systems Reduced risk of fraudulent use of identity by employees Enhanced user convenience Increased costs savings due to reduced password maintenance costs User convenience due to no passwords to remember or reset and faster login Privacy ability to transact anonymously

3. AREAS OF APPLICATION:

1. BANKS:
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The customers iris data is used as the verification tool for access to the bank account, thereby eliminating the need for the customer to enter a PIN number or password. When the customer presented their eyeball to the ATM machine and the identity verification was positive, access was allowed to the bank account. These applications were very successful and eliminated the concern over forgotten or stolen passwords and received tremendously high customer approval ratings. Other uses:

Secure financial transactions Secure ATM transactions Secure eBusiness transactions No stolen credit cards Secure payroll administration Secure benefits administration

2. AIRPORTS: Airports have begun to use iris-scanning for such diverse functions as employee identification/verification for movement through secure areas and allowing registered frequent airline passengers a system that enables fast and easy identity verification in order to expedite their path through passport control. Queues will be shortened at immigration controls; passenger handling will be streamlined; and on-line booking of flights, hotels and rental cars will be handled securely.

3. SHOPPING: The iris sensors can be used for financial transactions in shopping centers and malls. A customer whose iriscode is present is in the database can make payments by simply gazing at an Iris Sensor present at the Shopping Center, there avoiding the fear of theft. 4. PASSPORT: In future an iris code of an individual can be used as a Passport. Other application areas include Prisons where the prisoners iris codes are stored in database to monitor their movements during Adjudication.

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Iris codes can also be used for: Employee Identification Positive Employee Identification Time and Attendance Eliminates Fraud in Disbursement / Entitlement Programs. Physical Access Control Control Access to Facilities Improves Resource / Supply Management Logical Access Control Positive User Authentication Protect Workstations and Networks Limit Access to Critical / Classified Data

3. TECHNOLOGY COMPARISION

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Method

Coded Pattern

Misidentif i - cation Security rate 1/1,200,00 0 1/1,000 1/700 H M L

Applications

Iris Recognition Iris pattern Fingerprinting Hand Shape Fingerprints Size, length and thickness of hands Outline, shape and distribution of eyes and nose Shape of letters, writing order, pen pressure Voice characteristics

H.S.F U L.S.F

Facial Recognition

1/100

L.S.F

Signature Voice printing

1/100 1/30

L L

L.S.F T.S

H.S.F High Security Facilities T.S Telephone services U -- Universal

H High M- Medium L- Low

L.S.F -- Low-security facilities

10. CONCLUSION
We can see that there are large application areas of the IRIS SENSORS ranging from Banks to Airports, Shopping malls to E-Governance, and Employee authentication to Prison security systems. There these Iris sensors eliminates our need to carry various
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identification cards such as ATM cards, Passports etc. and eliminates our need to memorize Pins and Passwords therefore securing our lives.

11. REFERENCES
1. http://techbiometric.com/biometric-products/iris-scanner-a-recognition/ 2. http://www.findbiometrics.com/iris-recognition/ 3. http://www.biometricnewsportal.com/iris_biometrics.asp

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4. www.ee.mcgill.com

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