Subcutaneous Vein Recognition System Using Deep Learning for Intravenous (IV) Access Procedure

Intravenous (IV) access is an important daily clinical procedure that delivers fluids or medication into a patient’s vein. However, IV insertion is very challenging where clinicians are suffering in locating the subcutaneous vein due to patients’ physiological factors such as hairy forearm and thick dermis fat, and also medical staff’s level of fatigue. To resolve this issue, researchers have proposed autonomous machines to be used for IV access, but such equipment are lacking capability in detecting the vein accurately. Therefore, this project proposes an automatic vein detection algorithm using deep learning for IV access purpose. U-Net, a fully connected network (FCN) architecture is employed in this project due to its capability in detecting the near-infrared (NIR) subcutaneous vein. Data augmentation is applied to increase the dataset size and reduce the bias from overfitting. The original U-Net architecture is optimized by replacing up-sampling with transpose convolution as well as the additional implementation of batch normalization besides reducing the number of layers to diminish the risk of overfitting. After fine-tuning and retraining the hypermodel, an unsupervised dataset is used to evaluate the hypermodel by selecting 10 checkpoints for each forearm image and comparing the checkpoints on predicted outputs to determine true positive vein pixels. The proposed lightweight U-Net has achieved slightly lower accuracy (0.8871) than the original U-Net architecture. Even so, the sensitivity, specificity, and precision are greatly improved by achieving 0.7806, 0.9935, and 0.9918 respectively. This result indicates that the proposed algorithm can be applied into the venipuncture machine to accurately locate the subcutaneous vein for intravenous (IV) procedures

Subcutaneous Vein Recognition System Using Deep Learning for Intravenous (IV) Access Procedure

Intravenous (IV) access is an important daily clinical procedure that delivers fluids or medication into a patient’s vein. However, IV insertion is very challenging where clinicians are suffering in locating the subcutaneous vein due to patients’ physiological factors such as hairy forearm and thick dermis fat, and also medical staff’s level of fatigue. To resolve this issue, researchers have proposed autonomous machines to be used for IV access, but such equipment are lacking capability in detecting the vein accurately. Therefore, this project proposes an automatic vein detection algorithm using deep learning for IV access purpose. U-Net, a fully connected network (FCN) architecture is employed in this project due to its capability in detecting the near-infrared (NIR) subcutaneous vein. Data augmentation is applied to increase the dataset size and reduce the bias from overfitting. The original U-Net architecture is optimized by replacing up-sampling with transpose convolution as well as the additional implementation of batch normalization besides reducing the number of layers to diminish the risk of overfitting. After fine-tuning and retraining the hypermodel, an unsupervised dataset is used to evaluate the hypermodel by selecting 10 checkpoints for each forearm image and comparing the checkpoints on predicted outputs to determine true positive vein pixels. The proposed lightweight U-Net has achieved slightly lower accuracy (0.8871) than the original U-Net architecture. Even so, the sensitivity, specificity, and precision are greatly improved by achieving 0.7806, 0.9935, and 0.9918 respectively. This result indicates that the proposed algorithm can be applied into the venipuncture machine to accurately locate the subcutaneous vein for intravenous (IV) procedures

AI-Driven Palm Vein Biometrics for Enhanced Authentication

Palm vein authentication stands as a pivotal biometric technology, offering a secure and non-intrusive method for identity verification. However, the efficacy of current palm vein authentication systems is hampered by limited dataset sizes and simplistic region of interest (ROI) extraction algorithms that struggle with environmental and anatomical variability. This thesis propels palm vein authentication technology into a new era by: 1. The collection of a highly sophisticated dataset of palm veins using infrared imaging equipment developed in the Mobile X lab. 2. The redefinition of Region-of-Interest (ROI) extraction for palm vein authentication using deep learning techniques that use region-based convolutional neural network models 3. The creation of a robust large-scale synthetic dataset of palm vein ROIs through the application of Generative AI technology, specifically, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) The newly acquired real dataset in the lab demonstrates superior diversity in image variations. The deep learning ROI extraction model demonstrates superior performance in handling complex translational, rotational, and proximal variations of the palm, significantly reducing authentication time and ’user friction’. The synthetic dataset created using the application of Generative AI yielded a large-scale data set that can be used as a standard benchmark that will pave the way for more accurate and reliable palm vein authentication systems

Finger Vein Image Deblurring Using Neighbors-Based Binary-GAN (NB-GAN)

Vein contraction and venous compression typically caused by low temperature and excessive placement pressure can blur the captured finger vein images and severely impair the quality of extracted features. To improve the quality of captured finger vein image, this paper proposes a 26-layer generator network constrained by Neighbors-based Binary Patterns (NBP) texture loss to recover the clear image (guessing the original clear image). Firstly, by analyzing various types and degrees of blurred finger vein images captured in real application scenarios, a method to mathematically model the local and global blurriness using a pair of defocused and mean blur kernels is proposed. By iteratively and alternatively convoluting clear images with both kernels in a multi-scale window, a polymorphic blur training set is constructed for network training. Then, NBP texture loss is used for training the generator to enhance the deblurring ability of the network on images. Lastly, a novel network structure is proposed to retain more vein texture feature information, and two residual connections are added on both sides of the residual module of the 26-layer generator network to prevent degradation and overfitting. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the proposed neighbors-based binary-GAN (NB-GAN) can achieve better deblurring performance than the the-state-of-the-art approaches

Single-Sample Finger Vein Recognition via Competitive and Progressive Sparse Representation

As an emerging biometric technology, finger vein recognition has attracted much attention in recent years. However, single-sample recognition is a practical and longstanding challenge in this field, referring to only one finger vein image per class in the training set. In single-sample finger vein recognition, the illumination variations under low contrast and the lack of information of intra-class variations severely affect the recognition performance. Despite of its high robustness against noise and illumination variations, sparse representation has rarely been explored for single-sample finger vein recognition. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on developing a new approach called Progressive Sparse Representation Classification (PSRC) to address the challenging issue of single-sample finger vein recognition. Firstly, as residual may become too large under the scenario of single-sample finger vein recognition, we propose a progressive strategy for representation refinement of SRC. Secondly, to adaptively optimize progressions, a progressive index called Max Energy Residual Index (MERI) is defined as the guidance. Furthermore, we extend PSRC to bimodal biometrics and propose a Competitive PSRC (C-PSRC) fusion approach. The C-PSRC creates more discriminative fused sample and fusion dictionary by comparing residual errors of different modalities. By comparing with several state-of-the-art methods on three finger vein benchmarks, the superiority of the proposed PSRC and C-PSRC is clearly demonstrated

Band-Limited Phase-Only Correlation (Blpoc) Using Fpga For Finger Vein Recognition System

Nowadays, due to the high security and reliable of finger vein pattern, it had become one of the major interests in the biometric research. In the last few years, a number of finger vein recognition algorithms have been proposed. Most of the proposed methods were implemented in software-based on a general-purpose processor, which have limitations on the processing speed, size and power consumption. To overcome these limitations, this thesis presents an architecture for finger vein recognition system based on BLPOC matching method. The BLPOC is a phase-based matching method which have benefits of high accuracy and less affected by image shifted or brightness changed. It involves a high computation process, which is 2D-DFT, therefore, it is necessary to implement on a hardware device such as FPGA. It consists of two types of multiplexer blocks, one DFT block, one CORDIC block, seven types of memory blocks, one subtracter block, one divider block and one comparator block; and is implemented using Verilog HDL and verified using the Altera Cyclone III EP3C120F780 FPGA board. The proposed DFT block had contributed to reduce the area used by 97% of the previously proposed DFT block. A finger vein image database of 204 classes has been used to evaluate the performance of the proposed architecture. Results show that the proposed architecture can process a single matching of two finger vein images in 1.15 ms, which is about nine times faster than the softwarebased implementation, while the accuracy is similar with the software-based implementation. In conclusion, the finger vein recognition system based on BLPOC is successfully implemented on a FPGA board with better processing time as compared with the software-based implementation

Cycle-consistent generative adversarial neural networks based low quality fingerprint enhancement

Distortions such as dryness, wetness, blurriness, physical damages and presence of dots in fingerprints are a detriment to a good analysis of them. Even though fingerprint image enhancement is possible through physical solutions such as removing excess grace on the fingerprint or recapturing the fingerprint after some time, these solutions are usually not user-friendly and time consuming. In some cases, the enhancements may not be possible if the cause of the distortion is permanent. In this paper, we are proposing an unpaired image-to-image translation using cycle-consistent adversarial networks for translating images from distorted domain to undistorted domain, namely, dry to not-dry, wet to not-wet, dotted to not-dotted, damaged to not-damaged, blurred to not-blurred. We use a database of low quality fingerprint images containing 11541 samples with dryness, wetness, blurriness, damages and dotted distortions. The database has been prepared by real data from VISA application centres and have been provided for this research by GEYCE Biometrics. For the evaluation of the proposed enhancement technique, we use VGG16 based convolutional neural network to assess the percentage of enhanced fingerprint images which are labelled correctly as undistorted. The proposed quality enhancement technique has achieved the maximum quality improvement for wetness fingerprints in which 94% of the enhanced wet fingerprints were detected as undistorted. © 2020, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature

DiffVein: A Unified Diffusion Network for Finger Vein Segmentation and Authentication

Finger vein authentication, recognized for its high security and specificity, has become a focal point in biometric research. Traditional methods predominantly concentrate on vein feature extraction for discriminative modeling, with a limited exploration of generative approaches. Suffering from verification failure, existing methods often fail to obtain authentic vein patterns by segmentation. To fill this gap, we introduce DiffVein, a unified diffusion model-based framework which simultaneously addresses vein segmentation and authentication tasks. DiffVein is composed of two dedicated branches: one for segmentation and the other for denoising. For better feature interaction between these two branches, we introduce two specialized modules to improve their collective performance. The first, a mask condition module, incorporates the semantic information of vein patterns from the segmentation branch into the denoising process. Additionally, we also propose a Semantic Difference Transformer (SD-Former), which employs Fourier-space self-attention and cross-attention modules to extract category embedding before feeding it to the segmentation task. In this way, our framework allows for a dynamic interplay between diffusion and segmentation embeddings, thus vein segmentation and authentication tasks can inform and enhance each other in the joint training. To further optimize our model, we introduce a Fourier-space Structural Similarity (FourierSIM) loss function, which is tailored to improve the denoising network's learning efficacy. Extensive experiments on the USM and THU-MVFV3V datasets substantiates DiffVein's superior performance, setting new benchmarks in both vein segmentation and authentication tasks