Iridian Introduces Fourth Generation of Iris Recognition Technology

MOORESTOWN, N.J. -- Iridian Technologies today announced general availability of its fourth generation iris recognition software, OpenIris(TM), a highly flexible, modular architecture that simplifies application development for large scale enrollment of national populations and simplifies integration of Iridian's software into physical access solutions.

Iridian has experienced accelerating adoption of its technology over the past two years with installations in the Canadian CANPASS program, the US/Canada NEXUS Air program, the United Arab Emirates and other Middle Eastern countries and immigration programs in the Netherlands, the UK, Germany, Australia and Japan. Furthermore, deployments using Iridian technology are increasingly exceeding one million enrolled users.

"As the breadth and depth of our deployments grow, our customers need a software architecture to meet those needs," said Frank Fitzsimmons, President and CEO of Iridian Technologies. "Our OpenIris software is designed to easily scale as deployments grow in terms of enrollments as well as camera volumes and they become more mobile."

Iridian's new OpenIris architecture offers a highly flexible, highly scalable framework for supporting complex and large-scale iris recognition applications. This web-centric, HTTP-based architecture provides for fast and secure communications among all the image capture, encoding, and matching components of the application -- allowing a dispersed or distributed application to operate seamlessly and reliably at virtually any scale, over almost any network topography. The OpenIris matching software provides configurable matching capabilities that make it easy to set up an array of application architectures including parallel matchers, distributed systems, client/server systems, and standalone/embedded systems.

OpenIris components communicate with each other using the PrivateID(R) Transport Protocol and can be configured using standard web browsers. The web server interfaces eliminate operating system dependencies for the application. Iridian has already demonstrated the power of this new architecture by demonstrating a 1-to-10 million IrisCode(R) match in less than 2 seconds using a standard Windows server. By adding additional OpenIris Matchers, large country populations can literally be handled in real time. "The new architecture was designed with the entire security system in mind. We started with the customers' application requirements and then incorporated industry standard communication protocols and best practices," stated Jim Lee, software project manager at Iridian. "Our primary goals were to provide the application developer with the maximum flexibility to scale applications while simplifying integration."

The new OpenIris components are fully backward compatible with Iridian's current product line. OpenIris uses standard Iridian PrivateID Data Packets to ensure interoperability across the range of Iridian-certified products. The increasingly extensive portfolio of Proof Positive(TM) certified imagers are compatible and interoperable with OpenIris.

(c) 2005 Business Wire