Is iris recognition harmful to the eyes?

The iris is an important structure of the human eye and plays an important role in people's daily use of the eyes. Iris recognition is a very advanced recognition technology, and it has the characteristics of anti-counterfeiting, uniqueness, stability, and accuracy. The debate in society about the harm of iris recognition mainly comes from whether the infrared light emitted by infrared shooting equipment will cause harm to the eyes. In fact, if it is used normally, it will not cause harm to the eyes.

1. First, let’s take a look at what iris recognition is

The iris is one of the components of the human eye. It is located between the black pupil and the white sclera and is ring-shaped. The iris contains many intertwined details such as spots, stripes, and filaments. Just like fingerprints, once formed during fetal development, they remain unchanged and are unique. Therefore, it can be used as a feature for identity recognition.

Iris recognition is not a new thing. The theoretical knowledge of identity recognition based on iris scanning can be traced back to the 1930s and was gradually commercialized in the 1990s. The main iris recognition research institutions include Iridian and Iriteck in the United States, Jiris in South Korea, Beijing Zhongke Hongba, Beijing Hongan Xiangyu, and Panasonic in Japan. Iridian has mastered the core algorithm of iris recognition and is currently the world's largest professional iris recognition technology and product provider.

Among all conventional biometric identification methods (including fingerprints, faces, irises, voices, palm prints, etc.), mainstream academia generally believes that irises are a more "advanced" identification method than fingerprints or facial recognition due to their own accuracy, anti-counterfeiting, uniqueness, and stability. It should be noted that compared to the 0.8% error rate of fingerprints and about 2% of faces, the error rate of iris recognition is only one in a million.

2. Will iris recognition cause damage to the eyes ?

Iris recognition is the process of using special infrared cameras to photograph a person's eyes and then matching their identity by analyzing the characteristics of the iris image.

The debate over whether iris recognition is harmful to the eyes mainly focuses on whether the infrared light emitted by infrared cameras can harm human eyes.

It is understood that the wavelength of infrared light emitted by infrared shooting equipment used for iris recognition is generally between 700-900 nanometers, and the light intensity is similar to natural light. The amount of radiation from 100,000 exposures is actually smaller than that of a one-minute phone call. Therefore, under normal use, iris recognition technology will not cause harm to the eyes.