2) False acceptance which is through confusion of one user and another or the acceptance of an invalid individual as being a user that is legitimate.

Although the rate of failure is easily adjusted through modifying the threshold through decreasing the rate of failure on the end of rejection or acceptance the increase of failure on the other end of the spectrum increases In the act of choosing equipment with biometric functions the considerations are stated to be:

1) Equipment cost and 2) Failure Rates.

Drawbacks to consumer embrasure of the retinal scanners are due to the requirement of the eye to be one to two inches away from the scanner while an LED is focused directly into the individual's eye.

IV. Specifics of the Biometric Technology Application

This type of technology is an application that through locating the iris with a monochrome camera approximately three feet from the eye. The narrowing of the algorithm moves from the right and left of the iris and then makes location of the outside edge while at the same time locating the pupil and the eye's inner edge. Visible and infrared light are used by the camera and the algorithm upon locating the iris utilized 20-D Gabor wavelets in a filtering and mapping function of the iris breaking it down into many separate phasors/vectors.

Values are assigned by the wavelets relating to the spatial frequency and orientation of those areas selected. The portion of the iris used is technologically converted into values of 512-byte IrisCode template. The iris has identification in 266 unique spots which serves as a template for live-scan images of iris comparisons.

One example of a product using this type of biometric capability is that of the Optical Biometric Reader with a template capacity of 720. Identification is through a one-to-many matching operation in which the captured image is compared to all images stored in the system until a match is located. False acceptance rates based on security settings of medium are sated to be 0.001% while false rejection rates are stated at 0.1%. There are nine security levels...

The visible light is not overly bright and everyone does not experience the spots in the eyes after the scanning that some report.
The application has been deemed through testing to be safe in its' use.

Summary and Conclusion

While there are those that feel retina scanning is too intrusive there are others that consider the small inconvenience well worth the security provided by the retinal scanning biometric technology applications in the realm of security assurance. There are also those who feel that this type of application could result in company abuse of the information relating to employees due to the fact that "while Iridians algorithms are only used for identification and verification, modifications could theoretically be made that would analyze the iris for disease, alcoholism, drug abuse and even a predisposition toward certain kinds of diseases." This fact alone leads to the conclusion that much legislation is certain in the future for the regulation of the optical biometric scanning application's use.

References

Niles, Suzanne (2004) "Physical Security in Mission Critical Facilities White Paper No. 82 - Revision 1 American Power Conversion APC 2004 ftp://www.apcmedia.com/salestools/SADE-5TNRPL.

Electronic, Acoustic and Optical Surveillance and Monitoring Systems

Market Research Report- Business Communications Co. September 2002 R2-612

Online available at http://www.mindbranch.com/listing/product/R2-612.html.

Guevin, Laura (2002) Is The Iris the Gateway to Our True Identities Biometritech Online available at http://productfinder.gcn.com/search/keyword/gcn/Eye%20Sca n%20 Tools/Eye%20Scan%20Tools

Optical Biometric Reader Control Module Inc. (2005) Product Specification Online available at http://www.controlmod.com/tier2/pdfs/bioscan/PS2105_125.pdf

Retina Biometric Technology Applications