Introduction
Smart recognition of human identity for security and control is a global issue of concern in
our world today. Financial losses due to identity theft can be severe, and the integrity of
security systems compromised. Hence, automatic authentication systems for control have
found application in criminal identification, autonomous vending and automated banking
among others. Among the many authentication systems that have been proposed and
implemented, finger vein biometrics is emerging as the foolproof method of automated
personal identification. Finger vein is a unique physiological biometric for identifying
individuals based on the physical characteristics and attributes of the vein patterns in the
human finger. It is a fairly recent technological advance in the field of biometrics that is
being applied to different fields such as medical, financial, law enforcement facilities and
other applications where high levels of security or privacy is very important. This
technology is impressive because it requires only small, relatively cheap single-chip design,
and has a very fast identification process that is contact-less and of higher accuracy when
compared with other identification biometrics like fingerprint, iris, facial and others. This
higher accuracy rate of finger vein is not unconnected with the fact that finger vein patterns
are virtually impossible to forge thus it has become one of the fastest growing new biometric
technology that is quickly finding its way from research labs to commercial development.
Historically, R&D at Hitachi of Japan (1997-2000) discovered that finger vein pattern
recognition was a viable biometric for personal authentication technology and by 2000-2005
were the first to commercialize the technology into different product forms, such as ATMs.
Their research reports false acceptance rate (FAR) of as low as 0.0001 % and false reject rate
(FRR) of 0.1%. Today 70% of major financial institutions in Japan are using finger vein
authentication.