Under the supervision of Dr Ajay Kumar of PolyU’s Department of Computing, the final-year undergraduate project “Iris Verification in Real Environment” developed by Ms Lau O-hung, won the Gold Award in the HKEIA Innovation and Technology Project Competition co-organized by the Hong Kong Electronic Industries Association (HKEIA) and Hong Kong Electronic Industries Association Education Foundation (HKEIAEF).

The competition aims at recognizing students’ outstanding final-year projects which demonstrate excellence in technology and innovation. This year more than 30 project entries were submitted from undergraduate students of electronic engineering or related engineering fields from universities in Hong Kong.

Automated personal identification using iris images has been widely used for high security access control and at border crossings. Currently deployed iris recognition technologies require very high quality images that are acquired under infrared illumination. It is often perceived to be hazardous to eyes for long exposure. Such strong imaging requirements need new technologies which can operate in real environment.

Ms Lau has therefore developed a working prototype solution for iris recognition using visible illumination images acquired from Android-based Mobile phones. This application requires user to provide his or her eye image from the mobile camera. This image is used to extract discriminative iris texture patterns and matched with stored templates to confirm the real identity of the person. Such contact-free and low-cost iris recognition solution using commonly available mobile phones has attracted attention from the application developers in the industry.