Patent ID: 8374404

Claim:
A system of iris recognition, comprising: storage configured to store reference hyper-spectral signatures for different portions of the iris of a person's eye for each of a plurality of identified persons, each said portion comprising one or more spatial pixels at a certain spatial resolution, each said reference hyper-spectral signature defined by features extracted from data contained in four or more bands within the RGB color space from approximately 400 nm to 700 nm, said reference hyper-spectral signatures for the different portions of the iris combining spectral diversity of the four or more bands and spatial diversity of said portions at the certain spatial resolution to distinguish color signatures that are not visually distinguishable by the human eye; a hyper-spectral sensor configured to sense data through an aperture at the certain spatial resolution from at least said four or more bands for the different portions of the iris in response to stimuli from an unidentified person's iris at a given range, the size of said aperture being at least ten times smaller than and providing at least ten times less certain spatial resolution than a near-infrared (NIR) sensor configured to produce a monochrome texture signature to identify the unidentified person at the same range; and a classifier configured to extract features from the data contained in the four or more bands in the different portions of the iris to produce sensed hyper-spectral signatures of the different portions of the iris at the certain spatial resolution of the unidentified person and compare the sensed hyper-spectral signature to the reference hyper-spectral signature for the same portion of the iris for the plurality of different portions to generate an output that identifies the unidentified person.