Wrist vascular biometric recognition using a portable contactless system

Human wrist vein biometric recognition is one of the least used vascular biometric modalities. Nevertheless, it has similar usability and is as safe as the two most common vascular variants in the commercial and research worlds: hand palm vein and finger vein modalities. Besides, the wrist vein variant, with wider veins, provides a clearer and better visualization and definition of the unique vein patterns. In this paper, a novel vein wrist non-contact system has been designed, implemented, and tested. For this purpose, a new contactless database has been collected with the software algorithm TGS-CVBR®. The database, called UC3M-CV1, consists of 1200 near-infrared contactless images of 100 different users, collected in two separate sessions, from the wrists of 50 subjects (25 females and 25 males). Environmental light conditions for the different subjects and sessions have been not controlled: different daytimes and different places (outdoor/indoor). The software algorithm created for the recognition task is PIS-CVBR®. The results obtained by combining these three elements, TGS-CVBR®, PIS-CVBR®, and UC3M-CV1 dataset, are compared using two other different wrist contact databases, PUT and UC3M (best value of Equal Error Rate (EER) = 0.08%), taken into account and measured the computing time, demonstrating the viability of obtaining a contactless real-time-processing wrist system.Publicad

A Dorsal Hand Vein Recognition-based on Local Gabor Phase Quantization with Whitening Transformation

The hand vein pattern is a biometric feature in which the actual pattern is the shape of the vein network and its characteristics are the vein features. This paper investigates a new approach for dorsal hand vein pattern identification from grey level dorsal hand vein information. In this study Gabor filter quadrature pair is employed to compute locally in a window for every pixel position to extract the phase information. The phases of six frequency coefficients are quantized and it is used to form a descriptor code for the local region. These local descriptors are decorrelated using whitening transformation and a histogram is generated for every pixel which describes the local pattern.  Experiments are evaluated on North China University of Technology  dorsal hand vein image dataset with minimum distance classifier and the results are analyzed for recognition rate, run time and equal error rate. The proposed method gives 100 per cent recognition rate and 1 per cent EER for fusion of both left and right hands.Defence Science Journal, 2014, 64(2), pp. 159-167. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14429/dsj.64.465

Biometric Systems

Because of the accelerating progress in biometrics research and the latest nation-state threats to security, this book's publication is not only timely but also much needed. This volume contains seventeen peer-reviewed chapters reporting the state of the art in biometrics research: security issues, signature verification, fingerprint identification, wrist vascular biometrics, ear detection, face detection and identification (including a new survey of face recognition), person re-identification, electrocardiogram (ECT) recognition, and several multi-modal systems. This book will be a valuable resource for graduate students, engineers, and researchers interested in understanding and investigating this important field of study

Palm vein recognition using scale invariant feature transform with RANSAC mismatching removal

Palm vein recognition has been gaining increasing interest as a biometric method, although there still remains an issue regarding difficulties in obtaining robust signals. In this paper, the effects of random sample consensus point mismatching removal and the use of different wavelengths of illumination on the recognition rate are investigated. The CASIA multi-spectral palm print image database was used to provide input signals and the scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) and random sample consensus (RANSAC) mismatching removal approaches were adopted for vein extraction and point feature matching. The results show that the RANSAC mismatching point removal was able to eliminate outliers while preserving the appropriate SIFT key points and that this led to an improvement in the equal error rate metric, signifying better recognition performance. The palm vein recognition system was found to achieve a better verification rate when infrared illumination in a specific spectral band was used to obtain the palm vein image

Evaluation of a Vein Biometric Recognition System on an Ordinary Smartphone

Nowadays, biometrics based on vein patterns as a trait is a promising technique. Vein patterns satisfy universality, distinctiveness, permanence, performance, and protection against circumvention. However, collectability and acceptability are not completely satisfied. These two properties are directly related to acquisition methods. The acquisition of vein images is usually based on the absorption of near-infrared (NIR) light by the hemoglobin inside the veins, which is higher than in the surrounding tissues. Typically, specific devices are designed to improve the quality of the vein images. However, such devices increase collectability costs and reduce acceptability. This paper focuses on using commercial smartphones with ordinary cameras as potential devices to improve collectability and acceptability. In particular, we use smartphone applications (apps), mainly employed for medical purposes, to acquire images with the smartphone camera and improve the contrast of superficial veins, as if using infrared LEDs. A recognition system has been developed that employs the free IRVeinViewer App to acquire images from wrists and dorsal hands and a feature extraction algorithm based on SIFT (scale-invariant feature transform) with adequate pre- and post-processing stages. The recognition performance has been evaluated with a database composed of 1000 vein images associated to five samples from 20 wrists and 20 dorsal hands, acquired at different times of day, from people of different ages and genders, under five different environmental conditions: day outdoor, indoor with natural light, indoor with natural light and dark homogeneous background, indoor with artificial light, and darkness. The variability of the images acquired in different sessions and under different ambient conditions has a large influence on the recognition rates, such that our results are similar to other systems from the literature that employ specific smartphones and additional light sources. Since reported quality assessment algorithms do not help to reject poorly acquired images, we have evaluated a solution at enrollment and matching that acquires several images subsequently, computes their similarity, and accepts only the samples whose similarity is greater than a threshold. This improves the recognition, and it is practical since our implemented system in Android works in real-time and the usability of the acquisition app is high.MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/50110001103 Grant PDC2021-121589-I00Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER) and Consejería de Transformación Económica, Industria, Conocimiento y Universidades de la Junta de Andalucía Grant US-126514

Handbook of Vascular Biometrics

This open access handbook provides the first comprehensive overview of biometrics exploiting the shape of human blood vessels for biometric recognition, i.e. vascular biometrics, including finger vein recognition, hand/palm vein recognition, retina recognition, and sclera recognition. After an introductory chapter summarizing the state of the art in and availability of commercial systems and open datasets/open source software, individual chapters focus on specific aspects of one of the biometric modalities, including questions of usability, security, and privacy. The book features contributions from both academia and major industrial manufacturers

Biometric Person Identification Using Near-infrared Hand-dorsa Vein Images

Biometric recognition is becoming more and more important with the increasing demand for security, and more usable with the improvement of computer vision as well as pattern recognition technologies. Hand vein patterns have been recognised as a good biometric measure for personal identification due to many excellent characteristics, such as uniqueness and stability, as well as difficulty to copy or forge. This thesis covers all the research and development aspects of a biometric person identification system based on near-infrared hand-dorsa vein images. Firstly, the design and realisation of an optimised vein image capture device is presented. In order to maximise the quality of the captured images with relatively low cost, the infrared illumination and imaging theory are discussed. Then a database containing 2040 images from 102 individuals, which were captured by this device, is introduced. Secondly, image analysis and the customised image pre-processing methods are discussed. The consistency of the database images is evaluated using mean squared error (MSE) and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR). Geometrical pre-processing, including shearing correction and region of interest (ROI) extraction, is introduced to improve image consistency. Image noise is evaluated using total variance (TV) values. Grey-level pre-processing, including grey-level normalisation, filtering and adaptive histogram equalisation are applied to enhance vein patterns. Thirdly, a gradient-based image segmentation algorithm is compared with popular algorithms in references like Niblack and Threshold Image algorithm to demonstrate its effectiveness in vein pattern extraction. Post-processing methods including morphological filtering and thinning are also presented. Fourthly, feature extraction and recognition methods are investigated, with several new approaches based on keypoints and local binary patterns (LBP) proposed. Through comprehensive comparison with other approaches based on structure and texture features as well as performance evaluation using the database created with 2040 images, the proposed approach based on multi-scale partition LBP is shown to provide the best recognition performance with an identification rate of nearly 99%. Finally, the whole hand-dorsa vein identification system is presented with a user interface for administration of user information and for person identification

Demographic Bias: A Challenge for Fingervein Recognition Systems?

Recently, concerns regarding potential biases in the underlying algorithms of many automated systems (including biometrics) have been raised. In this context, a biased algorithm produces statistically different outcomes for different groups of individuals based on certain (often protected by anti-discrimination legislation) attributes such as sex and age. While several preliminary studies investigating this matter for facial recognition algorithms do exist, said topic has not yet been addressed for vascular biometric characteristics. Accordingly, in this paper, several popular types of recognition algorithms are benchmarked to ascertain the matter for fingervein recognition. The experimental evaluation suggests lack of bias for the tested algorithms, although future works with larger datasets are needed to validate and confirm those preliminary results.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, 8 tables. Submitted to European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO) -- special session on bias in biometric