Public Iris Scanning Device In the Works 154
Nonfinity writes "A public iris scanning device has been proposed in a patent application from Sarnoff Labs in New Jersey. The device is able to scan the iris of the eye without the knowledge or consent of the person being scanned. The device uses multiple cameras, captures multiple images, and then selects the best image to process."
DAmn hollywood (Score:3, Funny)
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Such bad luck, too! That must have been one of 5 people that actually watched the movie.
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The patent system, as it's defined, says that patentable ideas must not be a logical extension of existing ideas or an idea already created by somebody else. I skimmed both links and I can't find (maybe I missed it?) any mention of a the date related to when this company claims first provable conception of the idea. Unless they built something years ago, this isn't going to hold water.
W
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Minority reported didn't include the design documents for that magical technology.
The patent [if any] would cover the design of the solution.
Just wait till warp drive is invented...
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Minority reported didn't include the design documents for that magical technology
Patents aren't about the design documents, their office clearly states it's about ideas. The reason most patents include design documents is because a patent can also be dismissed if it's too vague or encompasses a concept that's so large that it's unlikely the originator of the patent could have conceived a use that relates in some way. Many patents are filed without design docs, including quite a few from Microsoft, Sun, IBM, and Novell (just to name some of the worst offenders).
The patent [if any] would cover the design of the solution.
What do you mean, "if
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That's just it, a patent is supposed to cover the ideas contained within a design of a working solution. This is why you can't patent things that are illogical [or outside the realm of understood science].
Otherwise, we could just sit down, think of a million devices we can't create yet and shut down the "IP" industry.
Tom
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http://v3.espacenet.com/textdoc?CY=gb&LG=en&F=4
Right.
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You can't LEGITIMATELY patent things that can't exist or be designed.
Just like "you can't kill people" may technically be incorrect it's still acceptable forms of speech.
Tom
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So now.... (Score:2)
Mirrored sunglasses right on the eyeball....this should keep them from reading your iris or other eye data, eh? That and it just looks cool.
I know chicks hate it when you have mirror shades on at the beach, etc (I can't tell where his eyes are looking). I wonder how bad they'd hate these?
A side effect...no more red eye o
Mirrored Irises (Score:2)
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New product opportunity (Score:3, Funny)
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And cranking up the brightness on my monitors to compensate.
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Not only Minority Report. Wesley Snipes' performance in Demolition Man also demonstrated the scanning of an iris without consent (simply by scooping the eyeball out of a freshly killed person and plopping it on a sharp object, waving it in front of the scanner).
Just be glad that they copied it from Minority Report instead of Demolition Man. *shudder*
For everyone's sake... (Score:2)
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Hit it....
Put on... (Score:4, Funny)
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Make sure they're the mirrored type!
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Well that explains the FBI then. And the CIA. And the Secret Service. And....
"Can I ask you something? These sunglasses: they're really nice. Are they government-issued, or do all you guys go to the same store?"
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Hopefully, we who like to wear our tin foil hat i
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Priorities? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Priorities? (Score:5, Informative)
DHS has $19,632,348,000 to spend for 2007 [loc.gov] for the Secure Border Initiative (SBI) alone, so I guess they'll win.
Finally (Score:2, Funny)
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Oblig Breakfast Club:
[John hands you shades]
"For better hallway privacy."
Won't Work (Score:5, Interesting)
Those aren't the most optimistic claims (Score:3, Interesting)
false positives (Score:2)
I've never seen such pessimistic claims for iris recognition. With a false accept rate of 1/1000 to 1/10000, you can achieve a false accept rate of pretty much zero. I respect Simon Davies, but I'm not sure he has his facts right here.
Actually the only place RTFA gives a rate of false positives is where it says "Good quality scans result in a 'false match' less than one time per one hundred billion (this system has been used with excellent results in the United Arab Emirates)." I'd say that's pretty goo
Re:Won't Work (Score:4, Insightful)
BTW the Live Science article suggests that: "Good quality scans result in a "false match" less than one time per one hundred billion". This estimate seems to be off by a factor of between 1 and 10 billion. Check out other articles by the same journalist: "New Study finds Sun only 491 feet from Earth".
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The worse problem (Score:3, Insightful)
E.g., let's say you stick this in an airport, and give it an insane resolution camera. You want to identify suspects quickly in a crowd, right? So if this thing is this good at scanning people without even having them look in a gizmo, better batch scan any iris that has enough pixels on that camera, right?
The problem there is that there'll be maybe a thousand people in any place in the airport at a time, so aro
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Different people, bub (Score:2)
That's.. nice.. (Score:3, Funny)
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What's the point of changing unreliable technology with new unreliable technology?
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Can we at least get ONE thread that doesn't deal with "why upgrade to Vista"?
With technology this new (Score:3, Interesting)
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Contact lenses with fake iris images? (Score:5, Interesting)
How hard would it be to construct a contact lens with a unique, fake, computer-generated iris image (no idea how you'd do that, but "fractals" sounds like a good buzzword to insert here)? Sound like it would be a lot easier than fake fingerprints.
In a situation where you knew you were being scanned, the officials might say "I see you're wearing contacts, remove them please," but I don't quite see an airport saying "no contact lenses allowed in this airport..." particular if the idea is that the scanning is supposed to be surreptitious.
Anyone else notice the logical disconnect here? (Score:5, Insightful)
It also says "the newly proposed system is that it allows iris scans to be taken without the knowledge or participation of the subject."
What it does not say is that "the newly proposed system allows good quality scans, with a 'false match' of less than one time per one hundred billion, to be taken without the knowledge or participation of the subject." I fancy readers are supposed to infer that conclusion, which does not follow from the premises.
I'll bet the system has the usual impressive-sounding "99.9%" accuracy or something in that ballpark... like all those facial-recognition systems. Meaning a false positive rate of one in a thousand. Meaning that if one in a million airport visitors is a known terrorist with an iris scan in the database, then 999 out of every thousand people, yanked out of the concourse by polite but firm security officials, will be Lutheran grandmothers from Davenport, Iowa travelling to visit their children in St. Paul.
And the officials will be unable to give any coherent explanation, since the system is supposed to be surreptitions.
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If that Lutheran grandmother also just happens to look like the terrorist whose retina she matched, yes. Theyll pull her aside. The retina scans wont exist in a vacuum. There will be a name and picture of at least the face, and probably a text description to go along with it.
If it truly does have that accuracy, and combined with other data, its a lot easier to know if the person really is a terrorist or not. The Lutheran grandmother isnt going to look like a male Arab. Or a female one. Or even a young whit
You have a lot of faith... (Score:3, Interesting)
What makes you think that the new system will have pictures, a name and a text description when the current system only has one of them?
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They haveto be using infared, no way you can get a good iris reading without a light source at the camera point, and that has to be infared or UV to make it "invisible". IR is far easier and less of a hazard and I bet dollars to doughnuts that is their design.
A tachyon transmission from the future... (Score:1)
arrest you. People have tried in the past and failed miserably. To get through a
checkpoint you'd have to _be_ the guy you're trying to impersonate and I don't
mean just fake iris contact lense and fake thumbprints. You'd have to pass
biometric face recognition, voice recogntion and then you'd still have to have
the same body shape if they got see-through infrared imaging. Oh and at the newer
checkpoints downtown they would still
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http://www.9mmsfx.com/lenses.html [9mmsfx.com]
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I've done a bit of work on iris recognition. A basic system could probably be easily faked by a contact lens, but a more sophisticated system can measure tiny variations in your pupil dilation and how your pupil dilation responds to changing light levels too. Of
Lots of questions remain (Score:4, Interesting)
Identifying who you scanned. sure you can scan an iris without their knowledge but unless you have the pattern stored how will you know who it is? Perhaps do it at a register and match it to the card/id used? That would be underhanded to say the least.
Storage, how much space per pattern? What is the speed of comparison to a large database? Something that is quick enough to focus ads (for the minority report fans) would require serious processing power.
I could see it in small settings, say a business who needs a less instrusive means of security. Scan all your employees and only let them in, if accompanied by those who cannot be matched then don't admit to sensitive areas. However in the general public setting, costs for equipment to store millions of scans and process them fast enough to be meaningful is still aways off.
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The argument that we don't have the processing power/storage/response time to do something is only valid for a year or two. If I can do it in the lab today, add Moores law and I can do it in the wild in a couple of years.
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The database lookup would be interesting, but I'm sure that there are smart ways to optimise this. People have probably already started tackling these problems.
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Iris scanning and underhandedness go together. Motor vehicle administrators think it's the ideal biometric because the iris scan can be conducted surreptitiously as you are having your eye test for driver's license application/renewal.
In other news... (Score:2)
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"Proposed" is the right word. (Score:2)
I'd really like to see a system capable of the kind of detail, precision, speed, and tracking required for covert iris analysis, in real time, from a distance.
LSS: just because it's in a claim doesn't mean it'll ever happen - the name of the game is to add as many related claims as possible to cover all possib
Jab (Score:3, Funny)
Sir, you have a gift (Score:4, Funny)
btw FYOU~! now I'm gonna have that same vision every time...
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For what it's worth, I think of that episode every time I'm getting "the owl" put on my face.
Ok, That's IT! (Score:2)
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What worries me most... (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, thinking about it, what *really* worries me is that people *won't* object to it. Not really.
Ah! Brave new world... etc.
I may be working on that ap (Score:1)
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To b
I've previewed this technology back in 2005. (Score:3, Interesting)
I just can't see this system being used with cameras that randomly take pictures from varying distances and work, unless the cameras and software improved quite a bit in the past two years.
Neal Stephenson Snowcrash (Score:1)
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Maybe hanging out in smoke filled spaces will come back into fashion. Incidently this guy [andrewmcauley.com] is doing more with sea kayaks than most.
Cyberpunk explained (Score:2)
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IED (Score:3, Interesting)
Which terrorist group will detonate our beloved freedom fighters with this first?
"and when I gave them cell phones, they could not get enough...
generating the database is simple, just use the network of driver's license ID cameras.
the only good news is the economics of technology mean this will be first used by high-value targets against other high-value targets. Think large-scale corporate wars vs. vengeful government agencies...with the rest of us as collateral damage.
and- which foreign state will get access to our database first?
on the other hand, think of how many more dead soldiers we will be able to recognize on the battle field! yay!
Contacts? Glasses? (Score:2, Interesting)
Oh, and they're coated so as to reduce UV.
And suddenly (Score:2, Insightful)
I can't see this really working... (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, instead of 3 megapixels, think 12. That's still only 40 x 30 pixels. Not enough.
I'll worry when 100 megapixels becomes commonly available. (Yes I know the Navy has a 111 megapixel CCD).
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Ah, we're all safe until someone invents robotically aimed telephoto cameras.
How hard is that?
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As a professional robotics engineer who is also taking a computer vision class at the moment I'm glad you asked! IMHO the answer is about a 6 on a scale of 10 for difficulty by my estimates, even easier if you don't have the requirement to ID every single person in a crowd, and if the subject introduction rate is low enough.
There is already software to identify and track multiple human targets, there are algor
Diffraction grate contact lenses (Score:2)
Plenty of things get proposed and patented ... (Score:3, Interesting)
-b.
Link to project homepage (Score:3, Informative)
Stop it all with... (Score:2)
maybe it's time for a Corey Hart comeback (Score:2)
Re:Unlawful Search and Seizure (Score:5, Insightful)
The constant monitoring, surveillance, identification, numbering and tagging of people in our society is an affront to human dignity. It's an affront not only to those being numbered and tagged, though they are the ones most offended, it's also a stain on the dignity of any state that permits it. Anyone who disagrees should ask people who have been tagged, with a barcode.
But the interesting fact is, human dignity is not a universally recognised right. We've got rights to our property, lives and liberty, but not in most cases to our dignity. This is only something that has recently been awknowladged.
The word "dignity" dows not even appear in the US constitution(enacted 1787). US citizens do not have a constitutional right to it. The Irish constitution(enacted 1937) does mention in the preamble that it is being adopted in part "...so that the dignity and freedom of the individual may be assured". But this is only in the preamble.
Interestingly, the constitution of South Africa (enacted 1996), explicitly and unabiguously guarantees a right to dignity in Chapter 2: Section 10: I guess decades of having their dignity denied to them taught South Africans that this right doesn't really go without saying. This is one ammendment I would dearly love to see in my country's constitution. (Actually the SA constitution also guarantees the right to privacy [info.gov.za] and even the right to private communications. It's an extremely progressive document which unfortunately hasn't influenced older constitutions in the way that it should.)
Privacy in public is obviously a fallacy. But we should at least not have to suffer affronts to our dignity by being scanned and checked at every turn, or have our clothing seen through at every security checkpoint. Laws forcing Jews to wear stars or Muslims to wear crescents would probably still be constitutional in a lot of countries. A dignity ammendment would make what we know is wrong explicitly wrong. Humans aren't like animals. We have more needs than simply life, liberty and property. Dignity is one of those other needs.
Dignity (Score:3, Insightful)
a) A sign that the constitution will be applied in a very limited fashion, I.e. more as a nice-sounding statement of intent with very limited legal day-to-day application. I suspect this is the case in South Africa.
b) A legal train-wreck waiting to happen. Applying a legal concept of "a right to dignity" in practice makes many other infamous slippery legal issues seem easy by comparison. Expect a constantly changing (according to legal and politica
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The problem is that privacy, dignity, and all of that only apply to what the government can or cannot do. Same with free speech.
It doesn't say anything about corporations taking all the information they can, including surreptitious iris scans that pop advertisements. For that you need Congress to pass better consumer protection laws, and unless you live in California (where they go overboard with it), good luck with that.
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The constant monitoring, surveillance, identification, numbering and tagging of people in our society is an affront to human dignity. It's an affront not only to those being numbered and tagged, though they are the ones most offended, it's also a stain on the dignity of any state that permits it. Anyone who disagrees should ask people who have been tagged, with a barcode.
But the interesting fact is, human dignity is not a universally recognised right.
Since wh
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