In this blog post, we will examine whether iris recognition technology could be the best security system for protecting privacy in the 21st century.
The 21st century is an era that values privacy above all else. With the development of the information society, the protection of personal privacy has become an issue that is more important than ever. In the past, passwords consisting of numbers and letters were sufficient to protect important personal information, but with the sophistication of cybercrime and the emergence of various hacking techniques, security technology has had to evolve accordingly. This has led to the emergence of biometric recognition technology. Advances in science and technology have made it possible to protect personal information in a more secure manner, and among these, biometric recognition is considered the most secure method.
The most representative form of biometric recognition currently in use is fingerprints. Fingerprints are widely used for identity verification in various situations, such as immigration checks and driver’s license issuance. However, fingerprint recognition has several disadvantages. Fingerprints are vulnerable to external damage, and there have been concerns that they could be manipulated for criminal purposes. Iris recognition technology was developed to address these issues. Iris recognition provides higher security than conventional fingerprint recognition and is gradually being used in places that require high security, such as airports, research laboratories, and government agencies. Iris recognition began to be applied to some smartphones in 2016 and has become a technology that is easily accessible in everyday life.
What is the principle behind iris recognition technology? First, the iris is the tissue located around the pupil of the eye, which controls the amount of light entering the eye by adjusting the size of the pupil. The iris acts like the aperture of a camera, making the pupil smaller in bright environments and larger in dark environments. What is even more interesting is that iris information is formed at a young age and remains unchanged throughout a person’s lifetime. Even the irises of the same person’s left and right eyes have different shapes, which is why iris recognition is attracting attention as a security technology.
The iris recognition process is as follows. First, the eye is photographed using dim infrared light to obtain a digital image of the complex pattern of the iris. At this point, the camera minimizes the light reflected from the cornea to clearly record the iris pattern. The image is converted into digital data and then undergoes mathematical processing to extract unique characteristics of the individual. This is called a “digital template,” and the iris recognition system stores this template in a database and compares it with the user’s iris information to verify their identity.
Iris recognition technology has also begun to be applied to mobile phones. The Galaxy Note 7, released in 2016, was the first smartphone to feature iris recognition, attracting a lot of attention. To implement iris recognition, Samsung Electronics equipped the top of the device with a dedicated camera and infrared LED. In a typical visible light environment, recognition rates may vary depending on the color of the iris and the surrounding environment, so infrared LEDs are used to recognize iris patterns more accurately. This technology has gradually evolved and is now being applied to various smartphones, further enhancing user privacy and security.
Iris recognition has many advantages. First, the iris is located deep within the eyelid and eyeball, making it less susceptible to damage and less affected by external factors. Second, the iris has a unique pattern for each individual, enabling high-accuracy identification without physical contact. This makes it a useful security method during epidemics. In addition, as mentioned earlier, the iris is formed after 18 months of age and does not change throughout a person’s lifetime. This means that the iris can be used as biometric information that is even more unique and unchanging than fingerprints. No two people have the same iris, and even identical twins have different iris patterns.
The error rate of iris recognition is extremely low. While the error rate of fingerprint recognition is 1 in 10,000, the error rate of iris recognition is 1 in 10 million when using one eye and 1 in 1 trillion when using both eyes. Furthermore, since iris recognition is based on biological signals, it is impossible to recognize the irises of deceased persons or artificially created eyes. This serves to further enhance security.
However, iris recognition technology is not without its drawbacks. For example, recognition rates may decline in bright sunlight. In addition, recognition becomes difficult when the distance from the iris recognition device is far, and the fact that users must align their eyes precisely with the iris recognition device is also an inconvenient factor. Furthermore, when using iris recognition on a smartphone, the screen must be awakened, which can be slower than fingerprint recognition.
Nevertheless, iris recognition is currently considered the most secure security technology. It is already widely used in fields that require a high level of security, and more advanced forms of biometric recognition technology are expected to emerge in the future. As technology advances, security is becoming an increasingly important issue in our daily lives. There are growing expectations about what the next generation of security technology will look like and how it will protect our privacy.
