Patent ID: 8061842

Claim:
A method of automatically testing whether a human eye is alive, the method comprising the steps: stimulating the pupil of the eye with light radiation emitted by an illuminator at a pre-defined profile of changing light intensity over a time period; generating a sequence of images of the pupil with a camera during the time period; calculating characteristic dimensions of a hypothetical pupil from each image in the sequence; determining a function ƒ from the sequence of images, wherein ƒ defines changes in the characteristic dimensions of the hypothetical pupil during the time period; estimating values for parameters θ of a pre-defined mathematical eye aliveness model comprising the parameters θ on the basis of the function ƒ of the changes of the hypothetical pupil; comparing the values of the determined parameters θ for the function ƒ with a statistical template of values of the parameters θ for the selected mathematical eye aliveness model by a classification process; and determining whether the eye is alive based on the comparison.