NSW PREMIER ANNOUNCES IRIS INITIATIVE IN PRISONS

Sydney, Australia (April 23, 2004) – As part of the NSW State Government initiatives relating to Counter Terrorism Preparations Mr Bob Carr, NSW Premier, announced a further roll out of iris recognition technology in state prisons.

On the 21^st April Mr Carr announced that the NSW Department of Correctional Services had purchased the equipment required to operate the iris scanning equipment – which has been on trial at Silverwater Correctional Complex.

“This equipment will see a further crack down on people visiting high risk prisoners – reducing opportunities for smuggling contraband or information to suspected or convicted terrorists”, Mr Carr said.

The iris recognition True Identity – Visitor solution installed at Silverwater provides significant improvements in managing visitors to the facility, providing them increased visitor time, and reduced “processing time”. For the prison staff it ensures a smoother transit of visitors and a high degree of confidence in visitor identification.

True Identity – Visitor provides an exhaustive (one to all) database search of a database in excess of 12,000 visitors, from a number of identification cameras. As many as 4 million database comparisons are made each week. “This solution helps demonstrate one of the significant strengths of iris recognition technology” notes Craig Smith, Argus’ Chief Technology Officer. Since we installed the solution at Silverwater we have conducted in excess of 128 million identification comparisons and have not encountered a single mis-identification. In addition the technology is attractive in these types of environments since members of the public find the non contact nature of the technology appealing.”

About Argus Solutions

Argus Solutions Ltd is a world leader in the development and delivery of iris recognition applications and solutions for physical and logical access requirements. Based in Sydney, and represented regionally in New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan, Argus Solutions has a growing client base including major government agencies.

Web site www.argus-solutions.com

Contacts :

Carey McMahon for Argus
Tele: +61+2+9963 7300
carey.mcmahon@argus-solutions.com