John Daugman's webpage, Cambridge University, Faculty of Computer Science & Technology, Cambridge UK.

John Daugman OBE FREng
Professor of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Lecture courses:

Research interests:

Selected papers:

Daugman J (2024) "Understanding Biometric Entropy and Iris Capacity: Avoiding Identity Collisions on National Scales." Advances in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, 4(2), pp 2152-2163.
Daugman J, Downing C, Oluwatobi Akande, Oluwakemi Abikoye (2023) "Ethnicity and Biometric Uniqueness: Iris Pattern Individuality in a West African Database." IEEE Transactions on Biometrics, Behavior, and Identity Science, 6(1), pp 79-86.
Daugman J (2022) Video lecture, 28 minutes (70 MB .mp4 video file): "Biometric Entropy, Information Capacity, and Iris Recognition". Also available here in the cloud.
Daugman J and Downing C (2020) "Broken Symmetries, Random Morphogenesis, and Biometric Distance." IEEE Transactions on Biometrics, Behavior, and Identity Science (July 2020) 2(3), pp 271-278. ISSN: 2637-6407 (8 May 2020). DOI: 10.1109/TBIOM.2020.2993225
Daugman J and Downing C (2019) "Radial correlations in iris patterns, and mutual information within IrisCodes." IET Biometrics (May 2019) 8(3), pp 185-189. Online at IET Digital Library, or download PDF
Daugman J (2017) "Biometric entropy" (summary of IAPR Award Lecture). IAPR Newsletter (July 2017), 39(3), pp 4-5. PDF
Daugman J and Downing C (2016) "Searching for doppelgängers: assessing the universality of the IrisCode impostors distribution." IET Biometrics (Jan 2016) 5(2), pp 65-75. Online at IET Digital Library, or download PDF
Daugman J and Downing C (2017) "Iris image quality metrics with veto power and nonlinear importance tailoring." Chapter 4 in: Iris and Periocular Biometric Recognition (C Rathgeb and C Busch, eds), IET Publishing, ISBN: 978-1-78561-168-1, pp 83-100. PDF
Daugman J (2015) "Information Theory and the IrisCode." IEEE Trans. Info.Foren.Sec 11(2), pp 400-409. (PDF)
Hao F, Daugman J, Zielinski P (2008) "A fast search algorithm for a large fuzzy database." IEEE Trans. Information Forensics and Security 3(2), pp 203-212. ( PDF)
Daugman J (2007) "New methods in iris recognition." IEEE Trans. Systems, Man, Cybernetics B 37(5), pp 1167-1175. ( PDF)
Daugman J (2006) "Probing the uniqueness and randomness of IrisCodes: Results from 200 billion iris pair comparisons." Proceedings of the IEEE, 94(11), pp 1927-1935. ( PDF)
Daugman J (2003) "Demodulation by complex-valued wavelets for stochastic pattern recognition." Int'l Journal of Wavelets, Multi-resolution and Information Processing, 1(1), pp 1-17. ( PDF)
Daugman J (2003) "The importance of being random: Statistical principles of iris recognition." Pattern Recognition, 36(2), pp 279-291. ( PDF)
Daugman J (2002) "Gabor wavelets and statistical pattern recognition." The Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networks, 2nd ed., MIT Press (M. Arbib, editor), pp 457-463.
Daugman J (2001) "Statistical richness of visual phase information." Int'l Journal of Computer Vision, 45(1), pp 25-38.
Daugman J and Downing C (2001) "Epigenetic randomness, complexity, and singularity of human iris patterns." Proceedings of the Royal Society, B, 268, Biological Sciences, pp 1737 - 1740. (PDF)
Daugman J (2001) "Brain metaphor and brain theory." Chapter 2 in Philosophy and the Neurosciences, edited by W. Bechtel et al. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. (Scanned PDF here)
Daugman J (2000) "Biometric decision landscapes." Technical Report No. TR482, University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. (PDF)

Iris Recognition

All other links on this page relate to IRIS RECOGNITION, a practical application of the work in computer vision, wavelets, and statistical pattern recognition.

A billion persons enrolled: International deployments of these iris recognition algorithms.
Flagship deployment in India (Update: now 1.25 Billion citizens enrolled) (short article, PDF).
History of iris recognition.
General introduction (purpose, principle, current applications).
"How Iris Recognition Works" (.pdf reprint: J. Daugman (2004), IEEE Trans. CSVT 14(1), pp. 21 - 30.)
An iris with its "IrisCode" (and localization graphics). More examples of IrisCodes.
Detailed colour iris image, and another.
What iris patterns reveal in infrared light.
Some pictures and examples of deployments of the Daugman algorithms.
Quick Primer on Hamming Distances for Iris Recognition (4-page PDF)
Summary of statistical results from 200 billion iris cross-comparisons (spanning 152 nationalities in the UAE border-crossing database). More detailed report with full Probability Tables available here.
Examples of deployments at airports and border-crossings (.pdf article from Encyclopedia of Biometrics, 2010).
"Effect of Severe Image Compression on Iris Recognition Performance" (.pdf reprint: J. Daugman and C. Downing (2008), IEEE Trans. Inform. Foren. & Secur. 3(1), pp. 52 - 61.)
A large "watch-list" national security deployment of these algorithms.
Interview in BioSocieties (2008) about biometrics, anonymity, privacy, and the Liberal State.
Iris matching engine, and search speed.
Decision environment (separability of same vs different iris patterns).
Performance of these algorithms compared to other biometrics (UK National Physical Laboratory test report, 2001).
Mathematical explanation of "IrisCodes" and iris recognition.
Independence of bits across IrisCodes.
Binomial Distribution of unrelated IrisCodes (histogram of 9.1 million raw Hamming Distances).
9.1 million comparisons between unrelated IrisCodes (with rotations for best match).
Quantile-Quantile comparison between the data and binomial theory (9.1 million comparisons).
Why false match probability does not accumulate in large database searches.
What about genetically identical iris patterns (e.g. identical twins)?
Anatomy, physiology, and development of the iris.
Operators for localizing the iris within an image.
Advantages and disadvantages of the iris for identification.
Statistical demands of identification vs verification.
Is there advantage in combining multiple biometrics?
Links to some licensees and users of these algorithms; and partial list of applications.
Iris cameras that use these algorithms.
How these algorithms identified the National Geographic Afghan girl, 18 years later.
What about "iridology?"
More humour: "Iris recognition and The Simpsons Movie"
Cartoons about iris recognition from the British press.