Iris Scans

[Charles Parker]

From a News Article

Anonymous donor funds iris scan ID

Thanks to an anonymous donor, police in Franklin and Oxford counties will soon get a high-tech tool that will help find missing or abducted children and adults afflicted with Alzheimer's or dementia.

Nice---anything that will help with the abducted and sick----but I do not think it will help find them------help ID them but find them?

He said the device takes pictures of children's and adults' irises - the colored part of the eye unique to a person which doesn't change with age - and stores them in a national database. Unlike searching a database of fingerprints, which can take hours or days, iris-scan searches take seconds.

So is this national Data Base private run or is it part of the bio-metric that the FBI or some other government agency is supporting?

The local AFIS data base we have can search a set of fingerprints in just a few minutes. And the state system when searching a full set of 10 only takes a few minutes---latents might take a while but it all depends upon the priority set. I think with a missing child the priority would be number 1.

"For instance, if we use this during a child identification clinic and, God forbid, there is a child abduction later, and the child is found, within seconds we'll get an identification. With fingerprinting, a fingerprint has 40 something identifiable characters, but the iris has more than a couple hundred. So, it's a good means of identification and a great tool to have for missing persons and people we find who are unable to tell us who they are," Gallant said.

Fingerprints only have 40. Man was I instructed wrong. All this time I thought each finger contained 75-100 ridge characteristics and that times 10 fingers is 750-1000.

I think the fingerprint community should hire the PR people currently working in the Iris Identification community.

I am not knocking the technology but in the systems I saw it did not work very well with the deceased, especially those you could smell a 100 yards away.

Now for my 2cents if they were to spend that money on an AFIS they could identify children, troubled adults and knock down some crime here and there. More bang for the bucks. But with an Iris Scan system has anyone ever found a retinal image pattern at a crime scene. (Be careful with that word as it can go bad PC on you real quick)

I know I am just being pedantic and overly fixated on the terminology.

[Gerald Clough]

Well, I'll see your 40 characteristics and raise you another 35, according to another article on an Illinois county database:

"Compared with a fingerprint, "which might have 70 to 75 characteristics, the iris has 235 different characteristics. Each person's iris is unique, even right [eye] from left [eye]," said Melley."

In another, he bumped it by five and included the dreaded fading fingerprint:

"According to Robert Melley, Child Project vice president, a typical fingerprint has between 75 and 80 identifying characteristics and can fade as a person ages. But the eye has 235 different unique traits which never dissipate during a person's life."

An interesting quote from another news article:

"It’s more accurate than DNA, voice recognition and fingerprinting,” Peter Flynn, president of the Massachusetts Sheriff’s Association, said."

This one from an article in Technology Watch, seems to be a bit confused about what's being stored:

"The file generated to store the iris is significantly smaller than a fingerprint image - 512 bytes compared to 1.5MB -..."

I suspect one is the searchable code, and the other is image. 512 would not store a usable image of an iris. And the iris system, to be useful in field identification, includes a face photo. File storage is not an issue in comparison.

You mentioned PR. They've done a job on it, for sure. It's a PR person's dream. New technology. Bulletproof topic - missing children. A way for sheriffs to mount their own PR. Guaranteed media, for $10K in donated or drug money.

I'm not sure about the effort-benefits analysis here. The system depends on (1) the child being in the database, and (2) the child coming into police custody, and it's value is with those who won't identify themselves. The number of potential recoveries that would depend on IRIS is not so large. It has little or no value in identification of dead children, for physical reasons and the small number (40-150) of child abduction murders a year. In some of the articles, the sheriffs were touting iris systems more as a quick check on inmates, since it's a quick and cheap way to see that you're not releasing the wrong one. Iris is an easier sell for missing children. It does not yet have the stigma of association with criminals. It's reasonably cheap. The database is maintained by a non-government organization. And it's a good candidate for eventual development of hand-held field devices.

Besides - programs encouraging fingerprinting of children have been around for a very long time, so there's no whiz-bang PR potential and little money to be made.

[Danny Lamont]

Perhaps there is no whiz-bang because fingerprints have been around for so long; however, their idea of Level II friction ridge characteristics is a bit skewed. According to Scott's Fingerprint Mechanics, it is an average of 75 to 150 Level II friction ridge detail on the end joint of a finger. On a palmprint Level II friction ridge detail is on the average of 250 to 350.
Now, on top of that, just think of the Level III detail available when using edgeoscopy and poreoscopy. Oops, I almost forgot to add the class characteristics when using Level I. I do believe that although there is more whiz-bang in iris scans because it is so new, the amount of detail that is available to us when making comparisons is much greater.

[Charles Parker]

Gerald again you hit the nail on the head.

But a friend wrote me and I must say that Iris Scans do have a place in the Criminal Justice system. Child ID, I am not sold on, yet.