UMKC staff developing eye-scanning security verification app

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Photographer: Mitch Weber
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Posted: 11/02/2012

By: Mitch Weber

A collaboration between the UMKC School of Computing and Engineering and a Kansas City entrepreneur is creating an app for your smartphone that scans your eye for secure verification.

Dr. Reza Derakhshani, associate professor in the UMKC School of Computing & Engineering, came up with the idea of scanning the vessels in an eye in 2004, but technology hadn't caught up yet.

In 2008, he was granted a patent for the technology.

"The processing power of the cell phones, along with exceeding better cameras, has enabled us to deliver a technology like this," he said.

So by downloading the EyeVerify app , your phone becomes a vascular scanner which will match the patterns of veins in your eye.

"How your vessels are formed are very unique," he said. "Vasculature is so unique and it's really hard to spoof, it turns out."

Jeremy Paben, EyeVerify vice president of engineering, said the pattern can't be repeated in twins -- or even a clone one day.

"It's similar to fingerprint, voice recognition," Paben said.

All it takes is for the user to launch the app, then hold it up to the eye.

"For the time being, we're going to use the back facing camera because it's a better camera. Hold it up and look up and to the left and you can see the box tracking my eye and it's doing a scan," he said.

EyeVerify could be on the market and available for download sometime next year.

For more information, visit www.eyeverify.com