Towards Understanding Acquisition Conditions Influencing Finger Vein Recognition

Abstract

Finger vein biometrics are of growing influence in daily life high-security applications like financial transactions. Several application areas of finger vein recognition systems exhibit different environmental and non-environmental conditions, e.g. changes in temperature, illumination, humidity and misplacement of the finger. Experience in the application of various biometrics (e.g. fingerprints, iris, face) shows that acquisition condition changes may affect the recognition process. No systematic analysis on the impact of those condition changes influencing the performance of finger vein recognition systems has been conducted so far. In this chapter, 17 possible acquisition conditions are identified, described and a first proper investigation regarding their influence on the recognition process is performed. This investigation is done based on several well-established finger vein recognition schemes and a score distribution analysis. The insights gained in this chapter might help to improve finger vein recognition systems in the future. The first results reveal several acquisition conditions that significantly decrease the recognition performance. Especially external illumination condition changes and finger tissue temperature variation shows a severe impact. On the other hand, slight misplacement of the finger and sport activities (in particular cycling) has hardly any influence on the recognition performance.