Patent ID: 8189879

Claim:
A method for animal identification, comprising: obtaining an image of an eye of an animal including a pupil region and an iris region; extracting a set of pixel data from the image, the set of pixel data representing a region of interest of the iris region of the eye; and transforming the set of pixel data representing the region of interest of the iris region of the eye into a template of the region of interest of the iris region of the eye, the template for use in identifying the animal; generating a plurality of comparison templates by: applying a plurality of scale factors to the set of pixel data representing the region of interest of the iris region of the eye to generate a plurality of re-sampled sets of pixel data representing the region of interest of the iris region of the eye; and generating a comparison template from each of the plurality of re-sampled sets of pixel data representing the region of interest of the iris region of the eye; determining a match score value for each comparison template by comparing each comparison template to a previously enrolled template of an eye of a previously identified animal; and determining whether the eye of the animal matches the eye of the previously identified animal by comparing at least one of the match score values to a match threshold value.