Retinal angiography based authentication

Abstract

Traditional authentication (identity verification) systems, employed to gain access to a private area in a building or to data stored in a computer, are based on something the user has (an authentication card, a magnetic key) or something the user knows (a password, an identification code). But emerging technologies allow for more reliable and comfortable for the user, authentication methods, most of them based in biometric parameters. Much work could be found in literature about biometric based authentication, using parameters like iris, voice, fingerprint, face characteristics, and others. In this work a novel authentication method is presented, and first results obtained are shown. The biometric parameter employed for the authentication is the retinal vessel tree, acquired through a retinal angiography. It has already been asserted by expert clinicians that the configuration of the retinal vessels is unique for each individual and that it does not vary in his life, so it is a very well suited identification characteristic. Before the verification process can be executed, a registration step is needed to align both the reference image and the picture to be verified. A fast and reliable registration method is used to perform that step, so that the whole authentication process takes very little time. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.