Finger Vein Recognition

Smart recognition of human identity for security and control is a global issue of concern in our world today. Financial losses due to identity theft can be severe, and the integrity of security systems compromised. Hence, automatic authentication systems for control have found application in criminal identification, autonomous vending and automated banking among others. Among the many authentication systems that have been proposed and implemented, finger vein biometrics is emerging as the foolproof method of automated personal identification. Finger vein is a unique physiological biometric for identifying individuals based on the physical characteristics and attributes of the vein patterns in the human finger. It is a fairly recent technological advance in the field of biometrics that is being applied to different fields such as medical, financial, law enforcement facilities and other applications where high levels of security or privacy is very important. This technology is impressive because it requires only small, relatively cheap single-chip design, and has a very fast identification process that is contact-less and of higher accuracy when compared with other identification biometrics like fingerprint, iris, facial and others. This higher accuracy rate of finger vein is not unconnected with the fact that finger vein patterns are virtually impossible to forge thus it has become one of the fastest growing new biometric technology that is quickly finding its way from research labs to commercial development. Historically, R&D at Hitachi of Japan (1997-2000) discovered that finger vein pattern recognition was a viable biometric for personal authentication technology and by 2000-2005 were the first to commercialize the technology into different product forms, such as ATMs. Their research reports false acceptance rate (FAR) of as low as 0.0001 % and false reject rate (FRR) of 0.1%. Today 70% of major financial institutions in Japan are using finger vein authentication.