Communications of the ACM
The Public Eye?
Credit: University of Cambridge
In 2011, the Indian government launched the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), a program to collect the iris patterns and fingerprints of all of its 1.2 billion citizens within three years. To date, more than 540 million people have enrolled in the optional program, with one million more joining every day. Each new iris pattern is checked against every other pattern in the database to detect and prevent duplication, resulting in almost 500 trillion iris comparisons every day. The program relies on algorithms developed by University of Cambridge professor John Daugman.
Anonymity is a huge problem in India, as many of India's citizens have never had any form of government identification, making them ineligible for government benefits. Each person who enrolls with UIDAI is issued a unique 12-digit number, known as Aadhaar. The major challenge of Aadhaar is that every new entrant to the database must be checked against each existing entrant to prevent acquisition of duplicate or multiple identities.
The algorithms convert an iris pattern into a numeric code, which takes just a few milliseconds, and then measure the amount of dissimilarity between the new iris code and every other iris code. The researchers have found that an average central-processing unit core can complete about 1 million comparisons per second.
From University of Cambridge
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Abstracts Copyright © 2014 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
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