United Arab Emirates Deployment of Iris Recognition
In a ground-breaking deployment of these algorithms starting in 2001,
the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Ministry of Interior has used iris recognition
of foreigners entering the UAE at 35 air, land, and sea ports.
Via internet links each traveller is compared against about a million
IrisCodes on a watch-list; the time
required for an exhaustive search through the database is about 1 second.
On the average day, about 12,000 arriving passengers are compared against the entire
watch list; this makes about 12 billion comparisons per day.
So far about 7,500,000 exhaustive searches against that database have been done,
making about 7 trillion iris comparisons altogether. A total of 73,180 matches
have so far been found between persons seeking re-entry into the UAE and
persona non grata on the watch list.
It is important to understand why false match probability does not accumulate
in such large exhaustive searches, when the vast numbers of cross-comparisons
generate vast opportunities for false matches.
The mathematical feature of the algorithms that prevents accumulation of
error probability is explained
here.
The systems architect, application provider, and integrator for this national
programme in UAE is
IrisGuard.
An article describing this application in more detail is available
here.
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