Online personal verification by palmvein image through palmprint-like and palmvein information

Recently, palmvein recognition has been attracting much research interest. The joint use of palmprint and palmvein features can effectively increase the accuracy, robustness of palm based biometric techniques. And, as it is an inner vessel structure feature, palmveins can increase the anti-spoof and liveness detection capability of a palm based biometric system. However, lack of techniques to separate palmveins from palmprints in one image weakens the anti-spoof and liveness detection capability. This paper presents a novel online personal verification system by fusing palmprint and palmvein information. The proposed system includes: (1) A single camera and single light source to simplify the imaging system and save data collection time; (2) A morphological palmprint erasing technique to increase the accuracy of palmvein segmentation; (3) The fusion of palmprint and palmvein information to further improve the system accuracy. The experimental results demonstrated that since palmprints and palmveins contain complementary information, much higher accuracy could be achieved by fusing them than using only one of them. In addition, the whole verification procedure can be completed within 1 s, which implies that the system can work in real time.