Online joint palmprint and palmvein verification

As a unique and reliable biometric characteristic, palmprint verification has achieved a great success. However, palmprint alone may not be able to meet the increasing demand of highly accurate and robust biometric systems. Recently, palmvein, which refers to the palm feature under near-infrared spectrum, has been attracting much research interest. Since palmprint and palmvein can be captured simultaneously by using specially designed devices, the joint use of palmprint and palmvein features can effectively increase the accuracy, robustness and anti-spoof capability of palm based biometric techniques. This paper presents an online personal verification system by fusing palmprint and palmvein information. Considering that the palmvein image quality can vary much, a dynamic fusion scheme which is adaptive to image quality is developed. To increase the anti-spoof capability of the system, a liveness detection method based on the image property is proposed. A comprehensive database of palmprint-palmvein images was established to verify the proposed system, and the experimental results demonstrated that since palmprint and palmvein 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 in 1.2 s, which implies that the system can work in real time. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.