The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency is developing technology that will be able to identify people from their iris - even while they are moving at a distance.

Andrew Kirby, senior physical scientist at CIA's Intelligence Technology and Innovation Centre told a Centre for Strategic and International Studies forum on biometrics, held in Washington D.C. this week, that the Agency was also trying to improve facial recognition technology which can be notoriously inaccurate.

Differences in simple factors like lighting and expression can impede identification of someone using current facial recognition technology, said Kirby.

"Those differences are so significant that my own picture taken in two different places at two different times is actually more difficult to match than it would be to match me with someone in this audience," he told the forum.

"Kirby said his program, which was created two years ago, has set a goal of improving face recognition technology "by a factor of 10". Currently iris recognition technology is more reliable than face recognition technology but its limitation is that it requires a co-operative subject who will stand in front of the scanner and line up the eye properly, he said.

We're looking at remote iris recognition," Kirby said, adding that it would be more valuable if the iris could be captured by a camera while the person was in motion at a distance to make the identification.

"One of the main thrusts of our program is in fact to make this possible."

Guantanamo measures

The U.S. Army is using biometrics, which also includes the more commonly used identification tool of fingerprints, to build identity records for detainees at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Kirby said, adding the records could be used to identify detainees in the future.

John Woodward, director of the Pentagon's biometrics management office told the forum using biometrics could be important for counterterrorism and counterinsurgency efforts. For example, with a large number of foreign locals working on military installations overseas, if that person is fired for some reason and goes to another base to get hired under a different identity, biometrics could help identify that person.

It could also be used to identify people who try to give false intelligence at one U.S. location and then try it again under a different identity at another, he said.

The goal for the future is to combine different biometrics "to give us the ability to make identification from a distance to a very accurate level," said Kirby.

In 10 years, there will be handheld devices that "track the person's presence like a bloodhound," Tony Frudakis, chief scientific officer and founder of DNAPrint Genomics, said.

Barry Hodge, president of AcSys Biometrics Corp., said according to a recent study, the facial recognition biometric market worldwide is a US$21.5 million business and is forecast to grow to $791.6 million by 2009.

"That's a huge growth rate, so obviously people are expecting a lot of excitement and things to be happening around the facial recognition marketplace," he said.

Hodge said it was a difficult task to get computers to recognise people in the same way that humans did: "You recognise them from the back, you recognise them from the side, in varying lighting conditions. When you see people you know, you just know them. And teaching a computer to do that is an amazingly difficult task," Hodge said.

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