Clarkson, Notre Dame and Warsaw University of Technology collaborate on iris liveness competition

Over the next couple of months, researchers at Clarkson’s Center of Identification Technology Research (CITeR), along with the University of Notre Dame and Warsaw University of Technology will be slipping on contact lenses in an attempt to fool iris recognition systems.

Between the three schools, a world-wide iris recognition liveness competition will be held this summer; the findings of which will be presented at the IEEE conference on biometrics this fall.

According to Clarkson University’s website, developers of iris recognition technology from around the world have been invited to submit devices for the competition, and according to Clarkson prof and director of CITeR, Stephanie Schuckers, this competition provides manufacturers of iris recognition technology with much-needed third-party validation. It also gives government agencies and private-sector companies robust data to make informed purchasing decisions.

Reported previously, Schuckers has developed her own unique software to improve liveness detection and to detect fakes in both iris and fingerprint biometrics.

The technology she’s developed, called NexID, is currently in market.  When fingerprints are captured using fingerprint scanners, an image is taken and stored in a database for use when matching later on.  Fake fingerprints leave different patterns compared to that of a real fingerprint.  Schuckers’ software can detect the difference.

For the liveness competition, each system will take several hundred pictures of the researchers’ eyes and researchers will try to trick the technology by periodically putting on patterned contact lenses meant to alter the eye. More information is available from the CITeR website.

Article Topics

competition  |  IEEE  |  iris recognition  |  Stephanie Schuckers