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An Embedded Real-Time Finger-Vein Recognition System For Mobile Devices
An Embedded Real-Time Finger-Vein Recognition System For Mobile Devices
2, May 2012
Abstract With the development of consumer electronics, recognition can be made difficult by occlusions or face-lifts
the demand for simple, convenient, and high-security [3]; and biometrics, such as fingerprints and iris and face
authentication systems for protecting private information recognition, are susceptible to spoofing attacks, that is, the
stored in mobile devices has steadily increased. In biometric identifiers can be copied and used to create artifacts
consideration of emerging requirements for information that can deceive many currently available biometric devices.
protection, biometrics, which uses human physiological or The great challenge to biometrics is thus to improve
behavioral features for personal identification, has been recognition performance in terms of both accuracy and
extensively studied as a solution to security issues. However, efficiency and be maximally resistant to deceptive practices.
most existing biometric systems have high complexity in time To this end, many researchers have sought to improve
or space or both, and are thus not suitable for mobile devices. reliability and frustrate spoofers by developing biometrics that
In this paper, we propose a real-time embedded finger-vein are highly individuating; yet at the same time, present a highly
recognition system for authentication on mobile devices. The
complex, hopefully insuperable challenge to those who wish
system is implemented on a DSP platform and equipped with
to defeat them [4]. Especially for consumer electronics
a novel finger-vein recognition algorithm. The proposed
system takes only about 0.8 seconds to verify one input finger- applications, biometrics authentication systems need to be
vein sample and achieves an equal error rate (EER) of 0.07% cost-efficient and easy to implement [5].
on a database of 100 subjects. The experimental results The finger-vein is a promising biometric pattern for personal
demonstrate that the proposed finger-vein recognition system identification in terms of its security and convenience [6].
is qualified for authentication on mobile devices. 1 Compared with other biometric traits, the finger-vein has the
following advantages [7]: (1) The vein is hidden inside the
Index Terms finger-vein recognition; biometrics; mobile body and is mostly invisible to human eyes, so it is difficult to
devices; DSP forge or steal. (2) The non-invasive and contactless capture of
finger-veins ensures both convenience and hygiene for the
I. INTRODUCTION user, and is thus more acceptable. (3) The finger-vein pattern
Private information is traditionally provided by using can only be taken from a live body. Therefore, it is a natural
passwords or Personal Identification Numbers (PINs), which and convincing proof that the subject whose finger-vein is
are easy to implement but is vulnerable to the risk of exposure successfully captured is alive.
and being forgotten. Biometrics, which uses human We designed a special device for acquiring high quality
physiological or behavioral features for personal finger-vein images and propose a DSP based embedded
identification, has attracted more and more attention and is platform to implement the finger-vein recognition system in
becoming one of the most popular and promising alternatives the present study to achieve better recognition performance
to the traditional password or PIN based authentication and reduce computational cost.
techniques [1]. Moreover, some multimedia content in The rest of this paper is organized as follows. An overview
consumer electronic appliances can be secured by biometrics of the proposed system is given in Section 2. The device for
[2]. There is a long list of available biometric patterns, and finger-vein image acquisition is introduced in Section 3. Our
many such systems have been developed and implemented, recognition method is addressed in Section 4. Experimental
including those for the face, iris, fingerprint, palmprint, hand results are then presented in Section 5. Finally, concluding
shape, voice, signature, and gait. Notwithstanding this great remarks are given in Section 6.
and increasing variety of biometrics patterns, no biometric has
yet been developed that is perfectly reliable or secure. For
example, fingerprints and palmprints are usually frayed; voice, II. OVERVIEW OF THE SYSTEM
signatures, hand shapes and iris images are easily forged; face The proposed system consists of three hardware modules:
1
image acquisition module, DSP mainboard, and human-
This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science
machine communication module. The structure diagram of the
Foundation of China (No.60902068), Shandong Provincial Natural Science
Foundation (No.2009ZRB019RX) and Technology Development Program of system is shown in Fig. 1. The image acquisition module is
Shandong Province (No. 2010GGX10125). used to collect finger-vein images. The DSP mainboard
Zhi Liu is with the School of Information Science and Engineering, including the DSP chip, memory (flash), and communication
Shandong University, Jinan, 250100, China (e-mail: liuzhi@sdu.edu.cn).
port is used to execute the finger-vein recognition algorithm
Contributed Paper
Manuscript received 11/27/11
Current version published 06/22/12
Electronic version published 06/22/12. 0098 3063/12/$20.00 2012 IEEE
Z. Liu and S. Song: An Embedded Real-Time Finger-Vein Recognition System for Mobile Devices 523
and communicate with the peripheral device. The human- Our device mainly includes the following modules: a
machine communication module (LED or keyboard) is used to monochromatic camera of resolution 580 600 pixels,
display recognition results and receive inputs from users. daylight cut-off filters (lights with the wavelength less than
800 nm are cut off), transparent acryl (thickness is 10 mm),
and the NIR light source. The structure of this device is
illustrated in Fig. 3. The transparent acryl serves as the
platform for locating the finger and removing uneven
illumination. The NIR light irradiates the backside of the
finger. In [9], a light-emitting diode (LED) was used as the
illumination source for NIR light. With the LED
illumination source, however, the shadow of the finger-vein
Fig.1. The hardware diagram of the proposed system. obviously appears in the captured images. To address this
Input finger-vein Input finger-vein
problem, an NIR laser diode (LD) was used in our system.
images with images with Compared with LED, LD has stronger permeability and
corresponding ID corresponding ID higher power. In our device, the wavelength of LD is 808
nm. Fig. 4 shows an example raw finger-vein image
Segmentation and Segmentation and captured by using our device.
Alignment Alignment
Enhancement Enhancement
No
Feature Matching Reject
Templates
Yes
Accept
Fig. 3. Illustration of the imaging device.
Fig.2. The flow-chart of the proposed recognition algorithm.
5). Since the second joint of the finger is thicker than the first B. Image Enhancement
joint, the peak value at the second joint is less prominent. The segmented finger-vein image is then enhanced to improve
Hence, the position of the first joint is used for determining its contrast as shown in Fig. 7. The image is resized to 1/4 of the
the position of the finger. original size, and enlarged back to its original size. Next, the
image is resized to 1/3 of the original size for recognition.
Bicubic interpolation is used in this resizing procedure. Finally,
histogram equalization is used for enhancing the gray level
contrast of the image.
C. Feature Extraction
The fractal model developed by Mandelbrot [10] provides an
excellent method for representing the ruggedness of natural
surfaces and it has served as a successful image analysis tool for
image compression and classification. Since different fractal sets
with obviously different textures may share the same fractal
dimension [11], the concept of lacunarity is used to discriminate
among textures. The basic idea of lacunarity in many definitions
is to quantify the gaps or lacunae presented in a given surface,
which is used to quantify the denseness of a surface image. In
this study, we focus on combining fractal and lacunarity
measures for improving finger-vein recognition.
Fig. 5. Horizontal projection of the raw image. Let f g (i, j ), i 0,1, , k , j 0,1, , l , where f denotes
an image with k l pixels, and g i, j means the gray level
value at the i , j pixel. The gray level surface of g i , j
can be viewed as a fractal [12]. First, for g i , j ,
u0 i , j b0 i, j g i, j . Second, for 1, 2,3, , the
blanket surface is defined as follows:
image is segmented based on the peak values of the which ensures that the upper surface u is above u 1 and
horizontal projection of the image. Second, a Canny also at a distance of at least 1 from u 1 in the vertical
operator with locally adaptive threshold is used to get the direction. The profile of u and b do not change when
single pixel edge of the finger. Third, the midpoints of
finger edge are determined by edge tracing so that the increases to n . The volume of the blanket v can be
midline can be obtained. Fourth, the image is rotated to computed by
adjust the midline of the finger horizontally. Finally, the
ROI of the finger-vein image is segmented according to
v (u (i, j) b (i, j))
i, j
(2)
deduce
a1
12 D , and take the logarithm at both
Fig. 7. The procedure of our method for image enhancement. a 2 2 2 D
Z. Liu and S. Song: An Embedded Real-Time Finger-Vein Recognition System for Mobile Devices 525
Fig. 10. The FAR and FRR curves of the method combining the blanket
dimension and lacunarity.
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