Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Eye movements as biometric identifiers?

For Your Eyes Only (TechnologyReview.com)
The way you view the world is unique, so why not use it to identify you?

A company in Israel has developed a security system that does just this--exploiting a person's unique pattern of eye movements to identify them. Most biometric security systems measure physical features that are constant, such as fingerprints or iris patterns. An eye-tracking system has the potential to be harder to fool and easier use, its creators say.
My first thought was to compare this to using a handwritten signature as a biometric. The biometric consists of the unique way in which someone moves a part of their body.

This would seem to be analogous to handwriting analysis because the way the system induces a subject's eye movements (by visually tracking a moving icon) isn't the same in each verification, the way your signature is meant to be (approximately) the same each time you sign something.