1 Introduction
The idea of using the iris texture to discriminate between individuals came from Bertillon and is over 100 years old. In 1987, Flom and Safir obtained the first patent for an automated iris recognition process, and few years later, Daugman published a method that is the basis of near all of the currently deployed systems. Due to favorable comparisons with other biometric traits, the popularity of the iris has grown considerably over recent years and substantial attention has been paid by both commercial and governmental organizations. Nationwide applications are starting to be deployed (e.g., border control in the United Kingdom
http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/managingborders/technology/iris/.
and United Arab Emirateshttp://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1347658.
). These large applications are regarded as a grand challenge for the pattern recognition community. As an illustration, over 50 percent of the publications cited in a recent iris recognition survey [3] were published since 2005.