AI distinguishes living eyeballs from dead ones

It's a plot straight out of science fiction: Bad guys dispose of an unlucky security guard, scoop out one of the guy's (or gal's) eyeballs, and hold it up to an iris scanner, fooling it into disarming a security system. As it turns out, post-mortem eyes can be used for biometric identification hours or even days after death, studies show. But if researchers at Warsaw University of Technology in Poland have their way, that might not be the case for much longer. In a paper ("Presentation Attack Detection for Cadaver Irises") published on the preprint server Arxiv.org, the team proposed a neural network that can tell the difference between living irises and dead ones with 99 percent accuracy. "With increasing importance that biometric authentication gains in our daily lives, fears are increasingly common among users, regarding the possibility of unauthorized access to our data, identity, or assets after our demise," the researchers wrote.