The proposal addresses the feasibility of using a CCD camera interfaced to a computer to photograph and analyze, in real time by a pattern recognition system, the digitized retinal patterns of humans for the purpose of identification. The fundamental issues to be considered in the Phase I research plan are: (a) the establishment of a retinal data base model to determine the legitimate, information carrying features of human vasculature pattern to be used by the feature extraction module of the pattern recognition system; (b) the design of the most appropriate retinal pattern classification (identification) algorithm based upon the information gathered in the retinal data base model; (c) the benchmarking and feasibility study of determining which CCD camera is most suitable in digitizing images of human retinas.
