Politech facecam archive: http://www.politechbot.com/cgi-bin/politech.cgi?name=facecam Politech biometrics archive: http://www.politechbot.com/cgi-bin/politech.cgi?name=biometrics --- http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,50470,00.html Scanning Tech a Blurry Picture By Declan McCullagh and Robert Zarate 2:00 a.m. Feb. 16, 2002 PST ARLINGTON, Virginia -- Iris-scanning and face-matching technologies don't work nearly as well as their manufacturers have claimed, the Department of Defense has discovered. In a 270-person pilot program at the Army Research Laboratory, the Pentagon tested iris recognition technology from Iridian for 26 weeks and the Visionics FaceIt system for 13 weeks. Iridian claims a 99.5 percent success rate, and Visionics predicts solid face-matches 75 to 99.3 percent of the time. The results: Reality didn't match the hype. At a biometrics conference on Friday, Defense Department official Steven King said that of the 270 persons checked by the Visionics system, it correctly recognized individuals a mere 51 percent of the time, and identified an individual to within a range of 10 participants 81 percent of the time. The supposedly more reliable Iridian eye-scanners, meanwhile, correctly verified someone's identity just 94 percent of the time. [...] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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