Patent ID: 8315440

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 re-sampling the template using a plurality of scale factors; determining a match score value for each of the plurality of comparison templates by comparing each of the plurality of comparison templates 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.