How to Teach an Iris Scanner That the Eye It’s Looking at Is Dead
August 29th, 2019Via: IEEE:
Conventional wisdom has held that the iris begins decaying only minutes after death. Thanks to Maciejewicz’s work, we discovered that wisdom to be wrong: If cadavers are kept cool, the eyes can still be used for identification for up to three weeks postmortem. Researchers had also assumed that recognition systems could not accurately identify dead eyes, which means that such systems are now vulnerable to exploitation. So to be completely secure, future generations of iris-recognition systems will therefore need more-advanced detection mechanisms, capable of recognizing dead eyes—otherwise, we could find ourselves in a science-fiction future where people could use someone else’s dead eyes to access information or locations they’re not supposed to. Less fantastical, though, the systems will also need to be flexible enough to adapt in instances where there are changes to an iris due to disease, and precise enough to tell whether the iris in question is a fake.
