Analysis of template aging in iris biometrics

It has been widely believed that biometric template aging does not occur for iris biometrics. We compare the match score distribution for short time-lapse iris image pairs, with a mean of approximately one month between the enrollment image and the verification image, to the match score distributions for image pairs with one, two and three years of time lapse. We find clear and consistent evidence of a template aging effect that is noticeable at one year and that increases with increasing time lapse. For a state-of-the-art iris matcher, and three years of time lapse, at a decision threshold corresponding to a one in two million false match rate, we observe an 153% increase in the false non-match rate, with a bootstrap estimated 95% confidence interval of 85% to 307%.