In theory, an iris scanner can be hacked using an eyeball plucked from the victim. Now researchers have trained a machine-vision system to tell the difference between dead irises and live ones.

Researchers want to block that flaw in modern iris scanners. The scientists have created an iris scanner that can tell a living iris from a dead iris using a machine-vision system.

The team trained a deep neural network on this dataset to classify an image of an iris as taken either while the subject was alive or post-mortem.