Your Iris Is More Unique Than Your Thumbprint

Our eye color comes from our iris, the tissue surrounding the pupil of our eye. Each iris has a unique pattern of ridges and folds, specific only to you!

Iris Patterns Have Been Observed Since Ancient Times

The iris works much like a camera’s aperture, regulating light levels and helping us focus. Anciently, diviners studied the eye’s unique characteristics to determine an individual’s destiny! While eye color may change over time, the iris’s pattern doesn’t.

Biometric Iris Applications Are Amazing

As early as the 1950s, scientists and health professionals suggested that the unique characteristics of the iris could be used for ID purposes. But, it wasn’t until much later that a system to recognize and catalog these ID points was developed. The algorithm used for iris ID scanning targets about 240 unique features in an iris in order to determine identity. That’s about 5 times as many as fingerprinting. The error rate is about one in a million—even less when you correlate it with other biometric scanning like fingerprinting and facial recognition. False negatives are about 10 times less common in iris scanning than in facial recognition.

Iris scans have already been incorporated into FBI security measures, and numerous businesses in the private sector. In Japan, you can use iris ID tech to unlock your smartphone!

Our Eyes Are One In A Million

Our Vision Source® practices know that each patient eye is different. Our eyes, our needs, our habits and lifestyles are all different, which is why you need personalized eyecare that monitors YOUR risks, knows YOUR history, and watches YOUR eye health. To find a Vision Source® practice near you, use our search tool. 

Top image by Flickr user Sharon & Nikki McCutcheon used under Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 4.0 license. Image cropped and modified from original.