Biometric iris scanner from Hoyos priced to compete with card readers
New York, NY--Hoyos Corporation (Hoyos), a Puerto Rico-based R&D laboratory and intellectual property holding company, announced that they will add a new iris scanning device, called the EyeSwipe-Nano, to their suite of identity management products. The EyeSwipe-Nano will be approximately one quarter of the size of the EyeSwipe-Mini, roughly the footprint of a dollar bill. The new product can capture the irises of people from a distance and in motion at a rate of twenty people per minute. The high throughput, accuracy, and ease of use make this device a highly attractive product for commercial, industrial, and high-density residential property usage.
The EyeSwipe-Nano will use the same iris-scanning technology that powers Hoyos’ entire suite of biometrics products. The product will be commercially available during the first quarter of 2011 and will be comparably priced to older technology card readers on the market today.
"Token-based access control systems are the most prevalent form of security in commercial real estate spaces around the world. The EyeSwipe-Nano will provide Pentagon-level security at price levels that any current or prospective user of card access such as property managers, financial institutions, manufacturers, retailers, REIT, or individual building owners can afford," said Hector Hoyos, CEO of Hoyos Corporation.
How it works
An iris scan is similar to taking a photograph and can be performed from up to 30 feet away. The iris-recognition algorithm first identifies the approximately concentric circular outer boundaries of the iris and the pupil in a photo of an eye. The set of pixels covering only the iris is then transformed into a bit pattern that preserves the information that is essential for a statistically meaningful comparison between two iris images. The result is a set of complex numbers that carry local amplitude and phase information for the iris image. Discarding the amplitude information ensures that the template remains largely unaffected by changes in illumination and virtually negligibly by iris color, which contributes significantly to the long-term stability of the biometric template.
To authenticate via identification (one-to-many template matching) or verification (one-to-one template matching), a template created by imaging the iris is compared to a stored value template in a database. If the distance is below the decision threshold, a positive identification has effectively been made. The reliability of any biometric identification depends on ensuring that the signal acquired and compared has actually been recorded from a living person to be identified and is not a manufactured template. Hoyos says it has solved the problem of live-tissue verification with its technology.
SOURCE: Hoyos Group; www.hoyosgroup.com/InformationCenter/NewsEvents/HPR12072010.aspx and www.hoyosgroup.com/InformationCenter/Iris101.aspx
Gail Overton | Senior Editor (2004-2020)
Gail has more than 30 years of engineering, marketing, product management, and editorial experience in the photonics and optical communications industry. Before joining the staff at Laser Focus World in 2004, she held many product management and product marketing roles in the fiber-optics industry, most notably at Hughes (El Segundo, CA), GTE Labs (Waltham, MA), Corning (Corning, NY), Photon Kinetics (Beaverton, OR), and Newport Corporation (Irvine, CA). During her marketing career, Gail published articles in WDM Solutions and Sensors magazine and traveled internationally to conduct product and sales training. Gail received her BS degree in physics, with an emphasis in optics, from San Diego State University in San Diego, CA in May 1986.