John Daugman OBE FREng
Professor of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
short biographical sketch
Lecture courses:
Research interests:
Computer vision, pattern recognition, neural computing, information theory.
Selected papers:
- 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 (2021) "Collision Avoidance
on National and Global Scales: Understanding and Using Big Biometric Entropy."
DOI: 10.36227/techrxiv.14061671.v1
- 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.
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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.
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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.
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