Vein pattern recognition based biometric system and methods thereof

• US 8,803,963 B2
• Filed: 09/22/2009
• Issued: 08/12/2014
• Est. Priority Date: 09/22/2008
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Arti Agrawal, Govind Agrawal, Kranthi Kiran Pulluru
• Original Assignee: Arti Agrawal, Govind Agrawal, Kranthi Kiran Pulluru
• Inventors: Pulluru, Kranthi Kiran, Agrawal, Govind, Agrawal, Arti
• Primary Examiner(s): Kelley, Christopher S
• Assistant Examiner(s): BEASLEY, DEIRDRE L
• Application Number:
  US13/120,081
• Publication Number:
  US 20110169934A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,785 Days
• Field of Search: 348/77, 382/115
• US Class Current: 348/77
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 21/32 using biometric data, e.g. fingerprints, iris scans or voiceprints
• CPC Class Codes: G06V 40/12 Fingerprints or palmprints
• CPC Class Codes: G06V 40/14 Vascular patterns
• CPC Class Codes: G06V 40/63 by static guides
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 63/0861 using biometrical features, e.g. fingerprint, retina-scan cryptographic mechanisms or cryptographic arrangements for entity authentication using biological data H04L9/3231

Abstract

Individual authentication techniques are disclosed, which relate to a vein recognition based to biometric authentication system. Systems and methods to capture the subcutaneous vein pattern at the back of the palm and use it as the biometric identity of an individual are also disclosed.

Claims

1. A vein pattern recognition based biometric system comprising

i. a hand placement unit and a detection unit being configured to inform a computing device about the presence of a hand for processing;

said hand placement unit comprises

a portion to rest flat portion of the palm,

a plurality of buttons to be pressed by thumb that indicate whether a left or right hand has been placed,

a concavity to rest a fleshy part of the palm, and

a portion to guide the wrist for alignment and a protrusion that separates the middle finger and the ring finger;

ii. an illuminating and imaging unit that comprises a bright object placed in the field of view of the illuminating and imaging unit that illuminates a region of interest with uniformly diffused near-infrared light;

iii. a feature extraction unit that extracts a vascular pattern from an image captured by the imaging device that represents the pattern as line-segment-hypothesis and binarized imagine; and

iv. a recognition unit that compares the extracted line-segment-hypothesis and binarized image with a stored line-segment-hypothesis and binarized image to authenticate the vein pattern, by;

constructing a matrix with live pattern segments and recorded pattern segments;

initializing a cumulative hausdorff distance to zero;

filling the matrix representing line segment hausdorff between predetermined segment (h) of the live pattern and the predetermined segment (k) of the recorded pattern;

selecting the smallest element from the filled matrix and incrementing the hausdorff distance with the selected element;

filling all the elements of row h and column k of the matrix with positive and negative infinity respectively; and

checking if the predetermined segments (h and k) in the live pattern and recorded pattern, respectively, correspond to a merged segment, and if so, filling all the rows corresponding to the core segments of h and columns corresponding to the core segments of k, respectively, with infinity.

2. The system as claimed in claim 1, wherein the system is configured to capture subcutaneous vein pattern at the back of the palm.

3. The system as claimed in claim 1, wherein the illuminating and the imaging unit comprises a camera, and light source.

4. The system as claimed in claim 1, wherein the bright object is reflecting mirror or an LED light source.

5. The system as claimed in claim 1, wherein the feature extraction unit and recognition unit comprises computing devices selected from a group comprising embedded system, PDA, mobile phones, computers and other related devices.

6. A method to authenticate vein pattern, said method comprising acts of

i. pressing the detection button by placing a hand in a hand placement unit to inform a computing device about the presence of a hand to allow it to automatically distinguish between right and left hands;

ii. illuminating a region of interest of the hand placed and capturing a binarized image of the hand;

iii. extracting a vascular pattern from the captured image for representing the pattern as a line-segment-hypothesis and binarized image;

iv. computing core segments and merging them to form an additional line segment hypothesis;

v. representing the line segment hypothesis in the form of a directed graph, where each node represents a line segment and there does not exist a path between two nodes if they have a common core segment; and

vi. comparing the extracted line-segment-hypothesis and binarized image with a stored line-segment-hypothesis and binarized image to authenticate the vein pattern, said comparing comprising the steps of;

constructing a matrix with live pattern segments and recorded pattern segments;

initializing a cumulative hausdorff distance to zero;

filling the matrix representing line segment hausdorff between predetermined segment (h) of the live pattern and the predetermined segment (k) of the recorded pattern;

selecting the smallest element from the filled matrix and incrementing the hausdorff distance with the selected element;

filling all the elements of row h and column k of the matrix with positive and negative infinity respectively; and

checking if the predetermined segments (h and k) in the live pattern and recorded pattern respectively corresponds to a merged segment, and if so, filling all the rows corresponding to the core segments of h and columns corresponding to the core segments of k respectively with infinity.

7. The method as claimed in claim 6, wherein the method of authentication comprises registration process comprising acts of

i. placing the hand in the hand placement unit and assigning unique identifier for each user;

ii. capturing the images of the hands for predetermined number of times upon pressing detection button and converting the captured image into bit pattern;

iii. computing prerequisite features from the captured image;

iv. matching the computed sample with previously obtained sample or samples of same hand; and

v. indexing the matched samples in the storage for authentication.

8. The method as claimed in claim 6, wherein the method computes:

i. difference between hand widths in the live pattern and recorded pattern, if the difference is greater than a prescribed threshold then returns zero (0);

ii. difference between number of vein points in the live pattern and recorded pattern, if the difference is greater than a prescribed threshold then returns zero (0); and

iii. match between the binarized image of the live pattern and the recorded pattern, where the match is carried out using logical operation between the live pattern and the recorded pattern to determine ratio of number of white pixels in the patterns.