- When a parent arrives to pick up their child at one of
three grade schools in the Freehold Borough School District, they'll need
to look into a camera that will take a digital image of their iris. That
photo will establish positive identification to gain entrance into the
school.
-
- Funding for the project, more than $369,000, was made
possibly by a school safety grant through the National Institute of Justice,
a research branch of the U.S. Department of Justice. "The idea is
to improve school safety for the children," said Phil Meara, superintendent,
Freehold Borough School District, on Monday. "We had a swipe-card
system that operated the doors, but the technology was obsolete."
-
- Installation of the iris technology began in October.
The system is now operational after two months of testing. The Teacher-Parent
Authorization Security System (T-PASS), a software application developed
by Eyemetric Identity Systems, was installed on the front office computers
at each of the three schools.
-
- It took software engineers about nine months to develop
the platform. Two technicians were hired by the school board to provide
IT support for maintenance and updates to the platform. School participation
in the 18-month study is voluntary.
-
- Parents who have children that attend any of the three
schools in the district, teachers who instruct students attending classes
at the locations, and staff employees are assigned access rights. Each
child can have up to four adults approved in the system.
-
- The platform provides entry-access controls, visitor
management and the capability to scan a driver's license from 50 states
and automatically import the information into the database. "The file
size created when the camera takes a picture of the iris to match it against
records in the database is about 512 kilobytes," said Raymond Bolling,
co-founder of Eyemetric Identity Systems, a spin-off of New Jersey Business
Systems Inc., which specialized in biometrics identification.
-
- The system takes a digital photograph of the iris, the
color portion of the eye, each time a parent, teach or administrative and
school employee gains access to the school. "The algorithm can map
out up to 242 unique points in the iris," Bolling said. "A good
fingerprint patch is anywhere from seven to 22 points."
-
- The algorithms for iris scanning are licensed through
a LG Electronics from Iridian Technologies Inc. The software keeps a log
and digital record or any visitor entering the school, which replaces a
four-column paper spreadsheet.
-
- Global biometric revenues are projected to grow from
$2.1 billion in 2006 to $5.7 billion in 2010, which includes iris scanning,
according International Biometric Group. Iris scanning is emerging, albeit
slowly. The research firm said iris recognition revenues are estimated
to exceed $250 million by 2008.
-
- Eyemetric developed and deployed the iris recognition
system using IrisAccess iris recognition cameras and software from LG Electronics,
and Tailgate Detection Alarm Recording (T-DAR) anti-tailgating system from
Newton Security. The hardware supporting the application is Hewlett-Packard
& Co.'s ProLiant DL140 servers, along with HP dx5150 desktop PCs with
Advanced Micro Device (AMD) processor, and Access Point for wireless networking
from ProCurve Networking.
-
- Email Story
- IM Story
- Discuss
- Printable View
|