if i wanted to perform an iris scan, would i need any additional api's or can i just use whats readily available?

Question

if i wanted to perform an iris scan, would i need any additional api's or can i just use whats readily available?

Answer 1

I dont believe there are any libraries as such for biometrics . Also unless you are using your own hardware I dont think its viable as none of the current phones have the camera resolution to capture an iris in its details.

Answer 2

You don't need any new APIs to do biometrics as such, but specialized biometric APIs do exist. They're typically most helpful if you want to make inter-platform information sharing easier, skip some of the boring parts of writing image acquisition/storing programs, that sort of thing. Writing code that's compatible with all the relevant biometric standards can get pretty gory without the sort of guidance that a biometric API can provide. The BioAPI Consortium (http://www.bioapi.org/) hosts some specifications and other such things on their website if you're interested in possibly acquiring one, although I'm not deeply familiar with all the stuff they're up to.

In deciding whether or not to use a biometric API, I would check first to see how easy it is to make your acquisition device interoperate with your software. If you're planning to just take a few pictures for research purposes and download them onto your machine from a camera that you've already figured out, it may be less important to get one than if you're taking a bunch of pictures for access control purposes, which requires that you plug different cameras into different computers in different places.