FROM FAST COMPANY


Eyeball This: Biometrics That Track The Way You See

What if you could be recognized by the way your eyes moved? An Israeli company believes that tracking the unique signatures in the movement of your eyeballs could be the most foolproof biometric system ever. What's more, its setup could be used as a lie detector, or a drug and alcohol test.

In ID-U Biometrics' system, the user has to watch a moving object onscreen, while the camera observes the motion of their eyes. Since the way our eyes move is based on a combination of factors --such as anatomy, physiology, behavioral characteristics, eye structure--it's a signature that simply can't be duplicated or forged, according to its developers.

Dr. Daphna Palti-Wasserman, CEO of ID-U Biometrics, says she designed the system by drawing up a wish list for the ultimate identification technology. "We explored the possible human signals and mechanisms that could deliver our dream biometrics," she told Fast Company. "It brought us to the visual system and to the dynamic approach."

This approach differs radically from eye-related biometrics we've written about previously, such as iris scanning. Iris scanning systems rely on matching the image of your iris structure with a stored pattern of your iris. In contrast, the pattern the ID-U technology is based on consists of dynamic movements made by your eyes as they track a target, something that cannot be controlled or learned. "Most of the eye movement components are involuntary, and we are not aware of them at all," says Palti-Wasserman.

The system requires only a screen, a camera and the ID-U software to obtain the identification signature. It can authenticate the user in as little as four to fifteen seconds and has a two percent error rate. Since it requires no specialized hardware, it can be easily deployed across a variety of platforms from homeland security applications to ATM transactions. It could one day replace conventional passwords in smartphones and PCs.


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FROM WALL STREET JOURNAL

NYPD Adopts Eye-Scan Technology

New York City police started using machines to scan the irises of prisoners for the first time Monday, part of a failsafe measure meant to ensure that suspects appearing before judges are not misidentified.

This past winter a New York City man charged with five armed robberies was released by a judge on his own recognizance after posing as a different prisoner who was arrested on a small-time drug offense. Freddie Thompson, 34, pulled the vanishing act from Staten Island Criminal court on March 10.

No one realized that the accused robber was gone until his case was called an hour later. Mr. Thompson was recaptured later that same day, police said.

A review of the mix up determined that the police officer who escorted Mr. Thompson to his court appearance didn't check his identification. It's a rare occurrence, but it has happened more than once.

"There have been a couple of cases in recent memory where a defendant was arraigned on a lesser charge and released when he shouldn't have been," said NYPD spokesman Paul Browne.

To prevent future mishaps, arrestees brought to Central Booking in Manhattan Criminal Court will now encounter a piece of equipment that looks a little like an ophthalmologist's eye machine.

The iris scanner will be part of the standard booking process, which also includes fingerprints and photographs. Before bringing a prisoner before a judge, police officers will use handheld devices to scan the prisoner's irises and confirm each identity against the earlier scan.

The $500,000 program will be expanded to Brooklyn on Friday, the Bronx on November 26, Queens on December 3 and Staten Island by December 9, Mr. Browne said.

The iris scans, like fingerprints and the photographs, are kept as a part of the case file, Mr. Browne said.

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FROM REUTERS

(Reuters Life!) - For you sir, a canned coffee. And for madam, perhaps a nice cold tea.

A new Japanese canned drink vending machine uses facial recognition technology to "recommend" drinks based on the customer's age and gender -- and sales have tripled over those from regular vending machines as a result.

The machines, developed by JR East Water Business Co, a subsidiary of railway firm JR East Co, use large touch-panel screens with sensors that allow the machine to determine the characteristics of an approaching customer.

"Recommended" labels will then appear on specific drink products. Suggested products may also change depending on the temperature and time of day.

"If the customer is a man, the machine is likely to recommend a canned coffee drink, since men tend to prefer these. If the customer is in their 50s, though, that recommendation is likely to be green tea," a company spokeswoman said.

A woman in her 20s will be recommended a tea drink or slightly sweeter product, since market research has shown that they prefer these.


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From technology Review
For Your Eyes Only
Everyone has a unique pattern of eye movements. A new biometric security system exploits this for a simple, hard-to-fool approach.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2010BY DUNCAN GRAHAM-ROWE E-mail Audio » Print
The way you view the world is unique, so why not use it to identify you?

A company in Israel has developed a security system that does just this--exploiting a person's unique pattern of eye movements to identify them. Most biometric security systems measure physical features that are constant, such as fingerprints or iris patterns. An eye-tracking system has the potential to be harder to fool and easier use, its creators say.

The new system tracks the way a person's eye moves as he watches an icon roam around a computer screen. The way the icon moves can be different every time, but the user's eye movements include "kinetic features"—slight variations in trajectory—that are unique, making it possible to identify him. This is less complicated than using a long pass phrase or a smart card to gain access to a computer system or a building.

"The interface is really very simple," says Daphna Palti-Wasserman, CEO of ID-U Biometrics, the company that developed the technology. "The user watches a target moving on a screen and a camera monitors their eye movement responses."

Eye tracking also requires no specialist hardware, other than a camera and a display, so it is cheaper and easier to deploy, Palti-Wasserman says. Using a standard video camera, the system can identify users with an accuracy of 97 percent, she says. Many cell phones and laptops already have this kind of hardware, so ID-U's system could be deployed widely for both desktop and mobile computing. The company is currently working on an app for the iPhone 4.

Other biometric systems can be fooled by a very accurate copy of, for example, a fingerprint or retina. This new system uses a biometric pattern that's very hard to copy, Palti-Wasserman says. "What we're doing is a challenge-response sequence," she says. "The whole process depends on what is being shown on the screen," she says.

Kevin Bowyer, a biometrics expert at the University of Notre Dame, notes that some voice, keystroke, and handwriting-based security systems already use a challenge-response approach. "The main advantage is to control the situation more in order to get better information and improve the confidence in your results," he says.

ID-U's system moves an icon across a screen in a way that elicits about a dozen distinct characteristics as the viewer's eyes move. These tiny movements are sampled 30 times a second. "When the target jumps, it activates specific mechanisms of eye movement, but when it moves smoothly or slowly, different mechanisms are activated," says Palti-Wasserman. ID-U will not reveal precisely which metrics its system uses, but Palti-Wasserman says it is analogous to watching the trajectories of two different people driving around the same track—they follow the same route, but there will be distinct differences.

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FROM SCIENCE DAILY

New Method to Identify People by Their Ears ScienceDaily (Oct. 11, 2010) —

Scientists working on biometrics at the University of Southampton have found a way to identify ears with a success rate of almost 100 percent.


In a paper entitled A Novel Ray Analogy for Enrolment of Ear Biometrics just presented at the IEEE Fourth International Conference on Biometrics: Theory, Applications and Systems, scientists from the University's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) described how a technique called image ray transform can highlight tubular structures such as ears, making it possible to identify them.

The research which was carried out by Professor Mark Nixon, Dr John Carter and Alastair Cummings at ECS, describes how the transform is capable of highlighting tubular structures such as

• the helix of the ear and spectacle frames and, by exploiting the
• elliptical shape of the helix, can be used as the basis of a method
• for enrolment for ear biometrics.

Professor Nixon, one of the UK's earliest researchers in this field, first proved that ears were a viable biometric back in 1999.

At that point he said that ears have certain advantages over the more established biometrics as they have a rich and stable structure that is preserved from birth to old age and instead of aging they just get bigger. The ear also does not suffer from changes in facial expression and it is firmly fixed in the middle of the side of the head against a predictable background, unlike face recognition which usually requires the face to be captured against a controlled background.

However, the fact that ears can be concealed by hair, led Professor Nixon and his team to research their use as a biometric further and to come up with new algorithms to make it possible to identify and isolate the ear from the head.

The technique presented by the scientists achieves 99.6% success at enrolment across 252 images of the XM2VTS database, displaying a resistance to confusion with hair and spectacles. These results show great potential for enhancing the detection of structural features.


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