How to decode the iris
From his lab at the University of Waterloo, Kaushik Roy is the first person in Canada to work exclusively on security applications for iris recognition, consumed in an effort to transform how technology reads the human eye.
While Roy will receive a PhD in computer engineering from Concordia in June, he has already begun a two-year post-doctoral research fellowship at the Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) Research Group at Waterloo.
The PAMI Group seems like an ideal fit for someone who wants to bring iris scanner technology to the next level.
“Unlike the iris scanning for national ID cards or in airports, I am working on non-ideal iris imaging. These are iris images captured in an uncontrolled environment, maybe from a distance or in a noisy environment,” says Roy. “This is a great asset for surveillance.”
Having spent his master’s and doctoral degrees researching iris recognition, Roy is considered an expert in the field with seven journal publications and dozens of conferences to his credit.
“Before I came to Concordia for my master’s I did some work in retinal recognition. When I got here my supervisor saw my past research and recommended that I switch to iris recognition,” says Roy. “I read a lot of papers on it, found that iris research was really interesting and decided to switch.”
As part of the emerging field of biometrics, Roy believes that his research could have a significant impact on security in the future.
“This can be used anywhere in homeland security, to access restricted information, for the identification of missing children or even welfare restrictions. In bank transactions you could use your iris structure instead of a password,” says Roy.
Roy’s goal for now is to become a faculty member at a Canadian university and build a research group in biometrics.
Related links:
• Concordia's Centre for Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence
• Concordia's Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science