A Wrinkle For Biometric Systems: Irises Change Over Time 59
scibri writes "The iris scanners that are used to police immigration in some countries, like the UK, are based on the premise that your irises don't change over your lifetime. But it seems that assumption is wrong. Researchers from the University of Notre Dame have found that irises do indeed change over time, enough so that the failure rate jumps by 153% over three years. While that means a rise from just 1 in 2 million to 2.5 in two million, imagine how that will affect a system like India's — which already has 200 million people enrolled — over 10 years."
Re:uh.... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think they could have a much larger problem. Since a diabetics eyes can change drastically in a 2-3 month period, and depending on who's data you're using. You're looking at anywhere between 3% and as high as 25% of the average population having a problem with this system.
Re:uh.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Error is not 1 in a million (Score:4, Interesting)
The tolerance is already set so loose that it only fails to approve the person 1 in 1 million times. It isn't the error rate, it's a reflection of the *wide* error tolerances set.
They did the same trick with the facial scanners, they rejected too many people when trialed at UK airports, so they 'recalibrated' them until they rejected only an acceptable number of people. Where 'recalibrate' is really just increasing the error margin till the reject rate is low enough that the last labour government can justify the purchase price.
Here they've set the iris scanner to only reject 1 in a million, and now it has to be set 3 times looser to reject 1/3rd of 1 in a million in order to keep the reject rate low enough so that it will still be that low after 3 years.
Oh, and one little side effect of these biometrics is that now have to get our passports updated every 5 years instead of 10, making any cost saving at the expense of the passport holder.