For the most part, when businesses are looking for a form of biometric access control to safeguard areas that need to be kept safe, secure and confidential, the first technology that comes to mind in many cases is fingerprint scanners.
There are a lot of different reasons for this; fingerprint scanners are relatively easy and affordable to set up, fingerprints are unique to an individual without significant changes and for most purposes provide a very high level of access control assurances.
However, it is not the only system of biometrics that is used, with some security companies and the Indian government opting for a biometric marker that is even more unique than a fingerprint in the form of iris recognition.
This, alongside retina scanning technology, are extremely promising pieces of access control technology that have become increasingly accessible and used to identify at least 1.5bn people, but is there a chance that it will not only be used alongside fingerprint scanners but supplant them?
Despite the technological advances, the answer is far more complex than one might expect.
Product Of Its Environment
In the vast majority of workplaces, fingerprint scanners are more than enough to ensure access control, but there are some situations where an even tighter grasp on security is needed.
This is where ocular recognition technologies come into play, and in that regard, there are three main systems that are used; retina scanning, eye vein verification and iris recognition.
All three focus on different parts of the eye and require different equipment, but are designed around the principle that the tiny intricate parts of the eye are unique to a degree that even identical twins share the same patterns, and will typically remain the same from birth to death.
Both of these instances are different to fingerprints; whilst the odds of it happening are one in 64 trillion and it has never once been recorded, it is theoretically (though not practically) possible for two sets of fingerprints to be identical.
Similarly, it is possible to lose your fingerprints through medical conditions, scarring, injury, frequent skin wear or exposure to quicklime, which means that certain scanners would struggle to get an identifying reading.
Whilst the chances of this happening to every single finger are unlikely, and most fingerprint scanners typically only need to read one fingerprint to determine access, it does mean there is a theoretical chance that it becomes impossible to use.
Iris scanners do not have this issue, because they rely on recognising complex patterns in the iris. These patterns are so unique that both eyes have different ones and they can be recognised through glasses, contact lenses and even sunglasses.
One complexity, besides the expense, that might stop eye scanners from becoming the main type of security scanner is difficulty in use. Retina scanners need to be very close to the eye, whilst iris recognition requires the eye to be open for enough time for the scanner to take a detailed shot.
These are complications necessitated due to the importance of ensuring that the scan is of live tissue rather than a photograph, and until this process lowers in cost and speeds up, it will be an important but not ubiquitous part of security.
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