Fingerprint and iris recognition, which have become ubiquitous as security technologies for mobile phones, each have their own shortcomings, and dorsal vein recognition technology is gaining attention. This technology is being practiced in various fields due to its resistance to external stimuli and low risk of personal information leakage, but improvements are needed, such as initial cost and hardware complexity.
When you go to a store to buy a new cell phone these days, you’ll find that most phones are equipped with fingerprint and iris recognition. In the 2000s, biometrics felt like a futuristic technology far removed from the general public, but in recent years, fingerprinting and iris recognition have become commonplace and often used to unlock phones. While some biometrics are becoming more and more common, both fingerprint and iris recognition have their drawbacks.
Fingerprints can be erased during heavy labor, and they don’t work well when hands are sweaty, covered in dirt, or swollen after washing or bathing. Iris recognition, on the other hand, has the advantage of being more convenient than other authentication systems from an analyst’s point of view because it can be compared to existing information by taking a picture of the iris with a special camera from a distance, and the picture taken with this special camera can identify multiple people at once without the person’s special consent. However, biometric information can be analyzed without the consent of the individual, which can lead to serious privacy breaches. Therefore, the dorsal vein recognition technology has recently been attracting attention because it can compensate for the shortcomings of biometric technologies such as fingerprint recognition and iris recognition. In this blog post, we will introduce the development and introduction of dorsal vein recognition, its principles, advantages, disadvantages, and future solutions.
The dorsal vein recognition technology was developed and introduced by a South Korean company and was first used in the access control system of the Ministry of Defense computer center in 1999. However, it was not commercialized for a long time, and only recently has it been used for biometrics in dormitories and smart devices.
Hemoglobin, a pigment contained in red blood cells in the blood, has the property of absorbing infrared light, and the back of the hand vein recognition technology takes advantage of this property. The process of recognizing veins on the back of the hand using vein recognition technology is as follows. First, infrared light is shone on the back of the hand, and the infrared light is absorbed by the hemoglobin in the blood vessels. The infrared light is then absorbed by the hemoglobin in the blood vessels. This darkened image is converted into a digital image using a small CCD camera, a type of digital camera. The vein pattern, including vein bifurcation, angle of the bifurcation, and number of bifurcations, is then extracted from the image, and these characteristics are stored in memory and compared to the vein pattern of the registered user for identification.
Since palm vein recognition technology recognizes individuals by analyzing the blood vessels inside the back of the hand, it is difficult to be damaged by external stimuli compared to fingerprints, which are worn out by labor. In addition, iris recognition can be analyzed by taking a picture with a special camera, but vein recognition requires the user to place the back of the hand directly, so it is relatively safe from biometric information being analyzed regardless of the user’s will. Also, since it uses infrared light, it is completely harmless to the human body, and unlike fingerprints, which can be faked, it is almost impossible to replicate. Thanks to these advantages, vein recognition technology is already being used as a means of identification at various schools, including Gwanaksa, a dormitory at Seoul National University, Kyungpook National University, Chungnam National University, and Kyunghee University, and Samsung Electronics has applied to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for a technology that recognizes the user’s veins on a smartwatch to authenticate the user’s identity.
However, current vein recognition technology is not perfect. First of all, the hardware configuration is complicated, and it is expensive to build the entire system, making it difficult to realize practical use. In addition, the complexity of the vein pattern on the back of the hand is large, and misrecognition may occur if the position of the hand is inconsistent during vein imaging. However, finger vein recognition technology has been developed to solve these problems, and the vein pattern of the finger is simple and small in size compared to the back of the hand, so it can be miniaturized and the problem of misrecognition can be reduced. As mentioned earlier, the initial cost of building the system is high, but once the system is built, it will be easy to use biometric technology even for people who have difficulty using existing biometric technology, such as people whose fingerprints are worn out due to heavy use of hands.
