October 7, 2005, Chatsworth, CA--IRIS International, a manufacturer and marketer of automated IVD urinalysis systems and medical devices, announced that its Advanced Digital Imaging Research (ADIR; League City, TX) subsidiary received authorization from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for testing of its 3-D Face Recognition technology on public populations.
This amendment to the grant award authorizes an exemption for human subject research under 15 CFR 27.202(b)(2) and allows ADIR to move forward with its plans to begin testing on contractors, local volunteers, and routine airport passenger traffic, in addition to IRIS employees.
Under an Advanced Technology Program (ATP) grant from NIST, ADIR is developing 3-D face recognition technology intended to provide convenient and unobtrusive personal identification for air travelers and for personnel who work in secure environments. The three-year project is being carried out in conjunction with academic collaborators at The University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M University, and Indiana University. Dr. Kenneth Castleman, president of ADIR, is the Principal Investigator on the project.
"This approval now lets us move into the next phase of development and testing," stated Dr. Castleman. "We are very satisfied with our progress to date and our internal testing is showing promising results. We are encouraged by the accuracy we have obtained while testing on a small population of employees and we are quite interested to see how the prototype system will perform on larger populations."
With this authorization, ADIR can now proceed to negotiate test protocols with future evaluation sites and expects to begin acquiring face images in a commercial environment by December 2005. Although the length of testing cannot be definitively established before the protocols are approved, the Company plans an iterative process whereby testing and development will proceed in parallel. The testing will progress through a series of incrementally challenging operational scenarios.