Feature Company

Interview with Jerry Ruddle, Senior Vice-President Global Sales and Marketing, Iridian Technologies, Inc.
August 2006

FB

Can you provide our readers with a brief background of the company? (Please note that at the time of this interview, news of the recent acquisition of Iridian by Viisage had not been announced. For information about this acquisition please read the press release on findBIOMETRICS.com)

JR

Sure, Peter, and thanks for the opportunity to talk to you! To roll the clock back, Iridian was founded in 1986 as a company called Eye-D by two ophthalmologists, Drs. Flom and Safir. In 1990 they formed IriScan and at that time Dr. John Daugman joined the partnership under contract to IriScan to develop the initial algorithms. IriScan developed the iris imagers as well, and through a 10-year period of time marketing that iris recognition hardware and software technology primarily for access control. In the year 2000 IriScan merged with an iris camera development partner Sensar, and formed Iridian Technologies. This venture capital round was funded by G.E. Equity, Perseus, Walden Capital and Penny Lane and the most recent round in 2005 was led by General Electric. The company is based on the development and establishment of some 30 patents, which frankly go far beyond the familiar Flom concept patent, and extend to such areas as image acquisition, illumination, and the matching algorithms. In the last 4 years we've built a global presence for Iridian and the brand, and we built a robust set of blue chip channel partner relationships through which we've been able to establish notable deployments around the world.

FB

What are the specific advantages of iris biometric technology over other types of biometrics?

JR

While each biometric has its strengths, iris offers certain significant advantages over other biometrics. Due to the accuracy of the biometric, iris is the only biometric really capable of convenient and definitive identification on a global scale. The texture richness of the iris itself enables the very high accuracy of the iris recognition identification process. In a one-to-all identification match, for example, the chance of a false match, otherwise known as the false accept rate, is less than 1 in 1.2 million. This is using one-eye to match, whereas it's in the neighbourhood of 1 in 1.44 trillion when you use 2 eyes to match. With our OpenIris® architecture we do a one-to-all comparison and return a definitive match in less than 2 seconds. So advantages of iris include speed, convenience, accuracy and - increasingly today in public-use applications - hygiene has become an important benefit as iris is a non-contact biometric. On the convenience front, iris is getting faster and faster as we expand the capability of iris image acquisition and processing to address less-than-ideal images and large-scale-databases. We are increasing the ease-of-use, decreasing false rejects and optimizing a range of performance metrics, which create the advantage of enhanced user experience with the technology. Iris-at-a glance, iris-on-the-move, and hand-held mobile iris capabilities empowered by our technology and in development with a number of our partners are examples of enhanced user interfaces that add to the customer advantage of having a broad choice of iris recognition imagers in the market today. The development momentum in this area is significant. For example, Iridian was licensed for technology and consultancy for the development of iris-on-the-the-move under contract to the US Government, and now several of our licensed partners are working on this capability where one can be recognized with an iris camera while moving through a checkpoint. The objective is to reduce the cost of this capability so that it can be an effective addition to large-scale deployments where multiple camera types are required to meet the needs of the enterprise.

FB

You mentioned Iridian's OpenIris® software architecture -- could you describe that for us?

JR

OpenIris® is a new architecture -- it is our 4th generation technology and it is both a platform and a set of software tools that enable the scalability of iris and enables us to perform a 2-second match among tens of millions of people in a database. It also is a software platform that enables iris on a chip, which will enable us to lower the cost of imagers and cameras through our partners, and it will drive the ubiquity of iris as technology costs decline. The "open" part of OpenIris refers to several aspects. Open systems use technologies that will interoperate with industry-standard hardware and software - and that is what open iris does. It provides the integrator operating system independence and large enterprise and database scalability with commercial off-the-shelf hardware. OpenIris breaks down the process of iris recognition into separate software components - for example image capture, quality, encoding, and matching -- to give the solution developer, integrator, or customer the freedom of implementing these components where and when they are needed. The iris image capture, encoding, matching (identification or verification) can all be separately addressed with OpenIris over an IP network via a standard web server interface. Another critical "open" aspect of OpenIris is that it brings compliance with international iris standards to our solution partners and our customers. Iridian believes strongly in open standards and for this reason we led the development effort, through ANSI and ISO standards bodies, of the international iris biometric standards that are fully adopted and in place today. The ANSI/INCITS standard 379-2004 and the ISO/IEC standard 19794-6-2005 are the iris biometric standards and provide specifications for both rectilinear and polar iris images and iris data interchange formats. Iridian's work on these standards paralleled our work with ICAO (the International Civil Aviation Organization, a 182 member-country United Nations Directorate), which a few years back accepted iris in their standard ICAO Doc 9303 as an approved biometric for machine-readable travel documents such as passports.

FB

Speaking of the traveller program -- can you give us an update on Iridian's involvement in the Registered Travellers program?

JR

The longest running registered traveller program with Iridian iris is the Privium program started in The Netherlands with the Schiphol Airport. This is followed by Canada's CANPASS program under the Canada Border Services Agency which is now servicing 7 of Canada's 8 major airports. CANPASS is now expanding at the request of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection folks to the bilateral Canada/US NEXUS AIR program, which will provide pre-clearance for travelers returning to the USA via all major Canadian airports. Germany has implemented registered traveller at its Frankfurt airport and the UK IRIS program is expanding through a host of the airports there for expedited immigration clearance. All of these programs are growing quite nicely. So this is part of the globalization of iris recognition. Coming back to the U.S. Registered Traveler programs, Iridian is very active with the TSA, the AAAE and the group called the RTIC -- the Registered Traveller Interoperability Consortium. Working with other industry leaders this group has developed interoperability, business and process standards for consideration and approval by TSA for the operation of Registered Traveller here in the US. Iridian's core technology was in each of the Registered Traveller pilots that were conducted very successfully a couple of years ago and is now the core iris technology in the currently running program in Orlando. This is the Clear program - operated by Lockheed Martin and Verified Identity Pass - where they have over 24,000 people enrolled in that airport with iris recognition and finger print biometrics.

FB

It is very exciting to see the momentum build on all those programs.

JR

It is -- and it comes at a time when other users like United Arab Emirates for border control, the United Nations for refugee repatriation, the United Kingdom for immigration and passports and Canada and the United States for customs and immigration are growing. The UAE for example is close to 900,000 enrolments with proven scalability. They are implemented across 50 land, sea and airport entry points in the UAE for detecting the re-entry of expellees and they have caught over 81,000 expellees with false documents attempting to re-enter the country. By the way, they are pulling back definitive matches of these individuals in less than 2 seconds so the speed and scalability are there. Failure to enrol is very low (less than 0.1%), with very good performance on other metrics as well.

The United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) is a similarly large iris program, This application of iris is for real-time fraud screen to prevent recycling fraud (attempting to receive aid multiple times) in the repatriation process on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The UNHCR is now expanding to the Congo where the good work of providing aid to refugees there continues. We have proven scalability and direct cost savings with an over 30 percent reduction in re-cycling fraud.
Specifics around UK IRIS - the UK is now live at Heathrow terminals 1, 2 and 4 and the Manchester Terminal 1 and Heathrow terminal 3 should be going live as we speak. Gatwick South, Gatwick North and Birmingham, are all in queue for deployment so we're pleased to see that the UK is experiencing the benefits of iris-facilitated registered traveler process such as convenience for travellers and productivity for the immigration authorities.

FB

A lot has been going on in the iris algorithm area. Can you elaborate on this for us?

JR

Iridian since its inception has taken the leadership role in iris recognition technology and the acquisition, encoding, and matching algorithms that enable it. The past three or four years have largely been focused on simplicity and ease of use - not on algorithms - but now it is time to bring some re-focus in the market on the algorithm area and we have done that with the announcement of the '2Pi-06' algorithm. There are a few reasons for Iridian to step forward with algorithm enhancements at this time. One is that in response to the expiration of the Flom patent, there are a number of new non-Iridian iris recognition offerings in the market as well as a number of algorithms being tested in academia. Commercially, we do have 30-plus active patents on technologies that that support the whole business of iris imaging -- acquisition, image processing, illumination and the Iridian algorithms. Those patents survive for some time, but with the expiration of the Flom there are naturally some new entries into the iris recognition world. That is a good thing for the marketplace and we welcome it. Secondly, the new algorithms that we have introduced to the market build on the excellent technology and knowledge of our foundation algorithms and respond to increased need for convenience expressed by major governments in public applications and the need for processing with large scale databases of non-ideal images. So if you are going to address increased convenience, ease of use, speed, and also some of the government requirements, non-ideal image capability becomes important and we have done a fair amount of work in that area. The new algorithms also prepare us for smaller and more mobile devices as it brings us into some of the new product areas -- iris--on-a-chip for example.

The new algorithms also address increased counter measures capability. We have brought to the market a couple of algorithms that address spoofing threats based on contact lenses, so that these advanced capabilities are available for customers as well. With the effort we are putting into algorithms and algorithm enhancements we bring lower false reject rates (FRRs). FRRs for biometrics as you know vary with different factors such as biometric acquisition devices, but Iridian it's partners and customers increasingly find iris system FRRs comparing very favourably relative to other technologies. We want to really drive the convenience, so even small improvements in FRR from existing low rates are appreciated. You will see quarterly releases of enhanced algorithm capability as we increase barriers to entry in this new competitive arena and bring additional capabilities to the technology. Iridian is pleased to continue its strong leadership role in moving iris algorithms' state-of the-art forward.

FB

Frost & Sullivan is predicting the iris biometric market to grow to over half a billion by 2009. Where do you see most of this growth coming from?

JR

You're right! The cumulative growth rate of iris as projected by Frost & Sullivan is in excess of 73% - that outstrips the overall biometrics market projected growth rate, which itself is a healthy 43%. The areas where we see significant growth for iris span the identity management solutions segments, including federal, state, and local law enforcement, defense and related credentialing, travel and border security, healthcare and entitlement programs, financial services including point-of-purchase, and the broad commercial applications identity and security markets.

The global market for border security will certainly help drive growth in other markets as biometric systems are becoming more well known and understood. With the trend toward lower cost iris imagers and the proven scalability of the technology, we also foresee increasing demand for large-scale applications in areas such as national elections authentication and regional disaster recovery programs.
In law enforcement and government credentialing you will see additional capabilities in iris recognition to facilitate law enforcement, which will complement the traditional strengths of fingerprint and face in this segment - latency (fingerprint) and forensic value (finger and face) -- with the speed and accuracy of iris' definitive identification capability. Iris biometrics will increasingly offer significant value to multi-biometric solutions for both government and commercial applications.
One of the sleeping giants for biometrics is the financial services growth market - in banking, retail operations and transactions. Point-of-sale and protection of privacy are things that iris brings together in the financial services market quite nicely. So these are the primary growth areas that we see for iris that over the next several years should support its growth beyond the market average.

FB

Just in summary, Jerry, what are the greatest challenges for Iridian over the next two years?

JR

Well, challenges really lie in scaling organizationally to meet the demands of the market for the technology. The iris technology we feel is ready to meet the challenge of global scalability but the organization and partner network needs to scale effectively also. We will continue to help drive the underlying cost of iris technology lower, but we need to also expand solutions availability to meet increasing demand. It is now a classic business expansion challenge. Systems and applications need to meet the growing market demand and this is the kind of business challenge we are prepared for now and look forward to meeting.

The increased use of multi-biometric applications and the ability to integrate these technologies is evolving fairly rapidly, but how the multi-biometric environment will actually deploy will depend on the intelligent integration of a broader set of identity management technologies and solutions. Each biometric has its useful purposes and I think the trick is to optimise the contribution of each identity solution component so that we are doing the right thing for the customer.

FB

Jerry, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us!

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