Sony Develops High Accuracy Finger Vein Authentication Technology

Feb 3, 2009 15:09 Nikkei Electronics Asia

Sony Corp has developed a finger vein authentication technology called Mofiria. The user-friendly technology is said to offer quick response and high accuracy and comes in a compact size for mounting on mobile devices such as a personal computer or mobile phone.

Compared to the other biometric authentication techniques, vein authentication technology is claimed to achieve higher accuracy on personal identification and forgery resistance because it uses the vein inside the human body. Finger vein patterns differ from person to person, and do not change over the years.

According to Sony, Mofiria uses a unique method where a CMOS sensor diagonally captures scattered light inside the finger veins, making a plane layout possible. As a result, a small and more flexible design can be realized in building this technology into mobile devices.

The vein pattern is extracted from the captured finger vein image, and data from the pattern is compressed into the size of one-tenth to store in memory, which makes it possible for the data to be stored on a mobile device.

Sony's algorithm achieves fast and easy operation. The vein pattern is quickly and accurately extracted from the captured finger vein image without a fixed finger position, as the position of a placed finger is automatically and simultaneously corrected. As a result, the authentication accuracy is less than 0.1% for the FRR (false rejection rate), less than 0.0001% for the FAR (false acceptance rate), and processing time for identification takes only about 0.015/second using a personal computer CPU and about 0.25/second when using a mobile phone CPU.

The company plans to promote the Mofiria technology for use in mobile devices, gateway security systems and solution services. Commercialization of this technology is expected to start within the 2009 fiscal year.

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