Galaxy Note 7 Iris Scanner Beans Spilled

Certainly, the big news so far this week has been the launch of the new Galaxy Note 7 smartphone from Samsung, which we spent some hands-on time with. This device was long rumored and a slew of those rumors focused on the fact that the Note 7 would have a fancy iris scanner in it for security. We even say a video leak of a guy showing us how the iris scanner would work. Now that the Note 7 is official, Samsung is offering up all the details on its iris scanner.

The iris scanner is an automated biometric identification system that can recognize patterns in the individual's iris from one or both eyes. The device scans the iris and each person in the world has a unique and different iris pattern in each eye. Samsung says that these patterns are established at a young age and that iris scanning is one of the most secure and reliable biometric techniques out there.

The Note 7 user's iris information is stored as encrypted code and when the iris is scanned again it is compared to that code to determine if the user can gain access or not. Note 7 users get a dedicated iris camera with a special image filter to receive and recognize reflected images of the iris with a red IR LED light. The IR LED means that the scanned images of the iris aren't affected by iris color or ambient light.

The scanner is able to receive iris data even in low light conditions. Samsung says that there are no health implications associated with using the iris scanning tech and the tech has received the IEC 62471 certification, which is the highest available for that sort of tech. The device does turn off automatically if the person is too close to the IR LED or if the phone detects overexposure to the IR LED sensor.

SOURCE: Samsung