3D ultrasound palm vein recognition through the centroid method for biometric purposes

Abstract

A few years ago, some of the authors proposed an ultrasound technique for achieving 3D palm vein patterns for biometric recognition purposes. That technique was developed with a commercial imaging system using doppler modality. Unfortunately, even if results were promising, the acquisition time was too long for practical applications. More recently, they proposed an effective recognition system that employs an ultrasound research scanner (ULA-OP), a CNC pantograph and a high frequency (12 MHz) commercial probe. The system is able to acquire 3D image of the human palm (38×25×15 mm3) in about 4 seconds. Successively, they developed a procedure to extract palmprint features and validated it with verification and identification experiments on a consistent ad hoc established database. In this work, a new method for extracting palm vein pattern is proposed. The procedure uses as input the same 3D images already exploited for extracting palmprint features, as matter of fact upgrading the recognition system to a multimodal system.