welcome to National Central University

NCU assistant Prof. Li Yung-hui from the Department of Computer Science & Information Engineering led the students, Lin Chin-yu, Chen Ho-hsuan, and Zheng Bo-ren, and the assistant, Ji Dai-yan, to participate in INPEX (The Invention & New Product Exposition) 2016, winning the gold medal in the electronics category with “Iris-Enabled Smart Glasses.”

“This research combines the popular wearable device, Google Glass, which is a revolutionary product but lacks the mechanism to verify users’ identities,” said Professor Li. “Therefore, the team’s invention emphasizes on implementing the iris recognition system on the smart glass to perform biometric verification to ensure that only the ‘legitimate users’ can use it.”

Both the hardware and the software of this invention have been completed. On the hardware side, an IR LED and a selfi IR camera whose depth of focus and viewing angle specifically tuned for iris image acquisition are attached to the glass frame, thus guaranteeing good iris images. On the software side, in addition to a fully functional Android system installed on the smart glass, there is a self-contained Android APP which is able to verify the identities and better the security by performing on-device iris recognition based on the image captured by the selfi IR camera.

“The structural characteristics of iris are formed in the embryo period and won’t change, as fingerprints and voiceprints do,” said Professor Li. “Everyone is unique. Hence, iris identification is a biometric verification with extremely high accuracy.” He views the following two years as the turning point of the development. Once the optical difficulties are conquered, the wearable devices which used to appear only in the science fiction movies could be expected in the real world soon.

Winning the award is not by chance. Professor Li said that when he studied for the doctor degree in Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, he has always been interested in “Facial Recognition.” However, iris recognition was never his first choice, since there are not many people who understand or study on it, and most of the patents are owned by others. He could not understand why his advisor assign such a research topic to him. But, as a Christian, he decided to obey, because the Bible said that “…obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ.”

Later he found that such obedience paid off because what he has been majored is something very unique and will become popular in the near future. Being able to do such a great job on the international competition is totally out of his expectation. And he attributes the achievement to the teamwork, because everyone has tried his or her best to achieve the goal together.