How your finger veins could help you shop safer Thursday, 27 October 2016

Hitachi says it has developed highly-accurate finger vein authentication technology using the cameras commonly integrated in standard smartphones.

The technology could enable biometric authentication using finger vein patterns to be available as a personal identification method for smartphone transactions such as online shopping. With the increasing use of smartphones for online shopping, management of private data, etc. in recent years, smartphone transactions have increasingly become the target of crime.

Hitachi says the advantage of finger vein authentication is the characteristics used for biometric identification are 'in vivo', thus making it more difficult to forge or spoof compared to other biometric methods such as fingerprint, facial recognition or voiceprint.

However, a dedicated image sensor using infrared light was previously necessary to capture finger vein patterns which are barely visible to the human eye.

The new technology allows highly-accurate finger vein authentication using the camera built-in on smartphones without a dedicated image sensor. It can identify each finger from a colour image of the user's hand captured by a camera, and reliably extracts the vein pattern information allowing it to distinguish information from skin surface creases which easily change.

The technology was developed to accurately compensate for positioning and inclination of the fingers by using actual images to identify the shape and colour of fingers so that only information from the finger area is extracted from the camera image. This raises the degree of freedom in finger position and angle. Further, by authenticating several different fingers at the same time greater security and higher accuracy can be achieved.

In future, Hitachi will combine this new technology with security solutions that it has foster to date, such as encryption, to contribute to an even safer and more secure society.

This technology is being exhibited at the Hitachi Social Innovation Forum 2016 in Tokyo on 27-28 October.

[Finger vein authentication technology using smartphone camera. Photo: Hitachi]