TrendTrend: The emergence of vascular pattern identification system

Published 10 January 2006

A Dutch company develops a new biometric measure — vascular identity —which holds the promise of being more usable, more accurate, and less susceptible to fraud than other measures

We know that biometrics is a rapidly becoming a major method for authentication the identity of people. We have also heard about some problems in ascertaining the identity of individuals based on biometric measures: Guitar players, brick layers, and surgeons have their fingerprints blurred because of their professional activities; people age and their faces wrinkle; members of certain groups in the population — blacks, Asians — suffer from higher false alarms than members of other groups, and more. Some biometric measurements are less susceptible to such problems: Iris and retinal scan, speech, facial thermograms, and hand geometry. Amsterdam-based Biometrics and Security, however, says it has a better solution: High-end vein scanning identification system.

The company developed the Hand Vascular Pattern Identification system (VP-II), which is a biometric identification system based on a conventional vein pattern recognition system. The system verifies or recognizes human users by using a sophisticated high-tech recognition algorithm based on hand vascular patterns extracted by an infrared optical sensor system. The sensor requires no physical contact, meaning that there are no residual biometric patterns which could be copied. This prevents potential fraudulent use which may be a flaw in other biometrics systems. Remember the problems guitar players and brick layers would have with a finger-print-based biometric reader? Not so with the VP-II: Scars on the hand or hand contamination cannot not interfere with vascular reading.

The company believes its new system is the most usable biometric system on the market: Finger-print-based systems can be used by only 95 percent of the population (that is, one out of twenty adults is unable to use a fingerprint-based system for various reasons), VP-II has a usability rating of 99.98 percent.

-read more at company Web site

A human hand’s vascular pattern

Biometric & Security’s hand vascular pattern reader