UIDAI
Definition
Unique Identification Authority of India, the statutory body created by the Aadhaar Act 2016 that operates the world's largest biometric identity system, with over 1.37 billion enrolled residents as of 2025.
- Full name
- Unique Identification Authority of India
- Established under
- Aadhaar Act 2016
- Scale
- Over 1.37 billion enrolled residents (2025)
- System
- World's largest biometric identity system
Common questions
What role does UIDAI play distinct from law enforcement biometric databases like AFIS?+
UIDAI runs a civil identity system built for 1:1 authentication of residents against services and benefits, not a criminal investigation database, so it operates under different legal authority and access rules than police fingerprint or DNA repositories.
Can Indian police directly query the UIDAI database during an investigation?+
Access is restricted; law enforcement generally requires a court order or statutory authorisation under the Aadhaar Act rather than direct query access, reflecting the system's design around individual authentication consent rather than open identification search.
Related terms
- DOD ABIS
- US Department of Defense Automated Biometric Identification System, administered by the Defense Forensics and Biometrics Agency, holding iris, fingerprint, face and DNA...
- Hamming Distance (HD)
- The fraction of bit positions where two IrisCodes disagree, computed only over mutually unmasked bits. Genuine pairs centre around HD 0.10-0.15; impostor...
- HIIDE
- Hand-held Interagency Identity Detection Equipment: a handheld iris and fingerprint capture device used by US military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan for...
- Integro-Differential Operator
- Daugman's boundary-detection method: it maximises the magnitude of the line-integral intensity gradient around circular paths, locating the pupillary and limbic boundaries of...
- IrisCode
- The 2048-bit binary template produced by quantising the phase of 2D Gabor wavelet responses across the normalised iris strip. Phase encoding provides...
- NIST IREX
- NIST Iris Exchange: the series of iris recognition algorithm evaluations conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology since 2009, providing...
- Puttaswamy V. Union of India (2018)
- Supreme Court of India judgment upholding Aadhaar's constitutional validity while classifying iris and other biometric data as sensitive personal information within the...
- Rubber-Sheet Model
- The coordinate transform that maps the annular iris region (between pupillary and limbic circles) to a normalised rectangular strip of fixed dimensions,...
- Usable Bit Fraction
- The proportion of IrisCode bits not masked for eyelid, eyelash, or specular reflection occlusion. Values below 0.7 reduce match confidence; values below...