Iris recognition and biometrics is a very significant topic these days, considering the improved nature of airport security and the serious efforts countries make to know the identities of travelers to and from their borders. Indeed, the Indian government is interested, ambitiously, in cataloging the iris patterns of all of its citizens within the next three years, “to give the poor an identity.” Society will forever debate the extent that privacy has to be maintained while providing security, but as of now governments are choosing to err cautiously on the side of security even at the expense of some individual privacy.

This text, written at the University of Salzburg, assembles the results of an impressive body of research on iris recognition and biometrics, and is a major contribution to the field. Special mention should be made of the foreword by John Daugman, who published the first significant iris recognition research paper in 1993 [1]. That particular paper posited that the failure of an independence test can be considered a significant match if high entropy exists amongst samples from the different classes, and can be thought of as providing the fundamental concepts for much of the research presented in this book. A significant amount of research has been completed since Daugman’s paper, and this text does an excellent job of bridging the gap.

The authors set a number of key objectives for this book. The first objective is to introduce the reader to all major components of an iris recognition system and to related biometric calculations, which includes a review of cutting-edge technologies in the field. This is primarily covered in the first part of the book (chapters 1 through 3). The second objective is to provide detailed investigations of advanced technologies, such as segmenting iris images (chapter 5), compressing large image files to store iris images for future comparisons and building a dictionary of feature classifications (chapter 8), improving statistical classifiers and comparators for iris recognition (chapter 9), ensuring the security of data analysis (chapter 14), and watermarking biometric images to prevent the infiltration of stored data (chapter 16). The last two main objectives permeate the entire text: to provide guidance to researchers in the design and selection of iris recognition and biometric software, and to present a comprehensive overview of the relevant current and classic literature on each subject. The authors have clearly met their objectives in this text.

The book is comprised of three parts: “Fundamentals in Iris Recognition” (three chapters), “Iris Image Processing and Biometric Comparators” (seven chapters), and “Privacy and Security in Iris Biometrics” (the remaining six chapters). A massive list of references (625) follows. Having been trained in image processing, this text hits a particular chord with its impressive breadth and depth of the subject matter. This text is sure to find a place on the desk of any researcher currently involved in iris recognition systems and the associated biometrics.