In true James Bond style, researchers from Warsaw University of Technology have trained artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to tell the difference between the irises of dead and live people to prevent a dead person’s eyeball from being used to circumvent security measures. The team used a database of iris scans from dead bodies and living people to train the algorithm, resulting in dead irises being detected with 100% accuracy, and giving the probability of live irises being misclassified at just 1%.
However, this level of accuracy is only reached after the person has been dead for 16 hours or more, said the study’s authors in MIT Technology Review. “Samples collected briefly after death can fail to provide post-mortem changes pronounced enough to serve as cues for liveness detection… giving these gruesome hackers a window of opportunity since freshly plucked eyeballs should work a treat.”
