[Cryptography] Of writing down passwords

[Alexander Klimov]

On Thu, 25 Sep 2014, Jerry Leichter wrote:
> If the question is "when will you be able to read text of the image 
> of a human eye as taken by something reasonably related to today's 
> cellphone camera", I think the answer is likely to be "never".  
> Even if it were physically possible, there's simply no reason for 
> cell phone cameras to evolve in that direction.

One reason could be exactly that it allows to implement a 
better "corneal imaging system" as suggested in 2005 [1]:

  It turns out that the cornea of an eye and a camera viewing the
  eye form a catadioptric imaging system. We refer to this as a corneal
  imaging system. Unlike a typical catadioptric system, a corneal one is
  flexible in that the reflector (cornea) is not rigidly attached to the
  camera. Using a geometric model of the cornea based on anatomical
  studies, its 3D location and orientation can be estimated from a
  single image of the eye. Once this is done, a wide-angle view of the
  environment of the person can be obtained from the image. In addition,
  we can compute the projection of the environment onto the retina with
  its center aligned with the gaze direction. This foveated retinal
  image reveals what the person is looking at. We present a detailed
  analysis of the characteristics of the corneal imaging system
  including field of view, resolution and locus of viewpoints. When both
  eyes of a person are captured in an image, we have a stereo corneal
  imaging system. We analyze the epipolar geometry of this stereo system
  and show how it can be used to compute 3D structure. The framework we
  present in this paper for interpreting eye images is passive and
  non-invasive. It has direct implications for several fields including
  visual recognition, human-machine interfaces, computer graphics and
  human affect studies.

In 2008 [2], it was possible to read text in reflections "from the 
other side of the street or from a close-by building". They were using 
a telescope, but see their Figure 1 taken with a camera from a short 
distance.

[1] <http://www.cs.drexel.edu/~kon/publication/KNishino_IJCV06.pdf>

[2] <http://www.infsec.cs.uni-sb.de/~unruh/publications/reflections.pdf>

-- 
Regards,
ASK