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Vein Patterns Could Replace Fingerprints
Death Metal writes "Companies in Europe have begun to roll out an advanced biometric system from Japan that identifies people from the unique patterns of veins inside their fingers. Finger vein authentication, introduced widely by Japanese banks in the last two years, is claimed to be the fastest and most secure biometric method. Developed by Hitachi, it verifies a person's identity based on the lattice work of minute blood vessels under the skin."
An evaluation by the National Physical Laboratory in the UK found vein patterns to be the least reliable biometric they'd ever encountered, worse even than face recognition which became notorious for its zero-percent hit rate in several public trials (OK, so you can't get worse than zero percent, but in carefully controlled lab trials face recognition did get a non-zero score).
Looks like another great example of biometric vendor marketing at work. "Buy our stuff, it's gooder than anyone else's!".
...getting sick of the endless ways to identify and tag individuals that have appeared recently? Fingerprints, iris scans, voice recognition, face regonition, smell (!) , walking gait, now vein patterns. How long before we're all just barcoded with a unique id??
I'm sure some people will say I'm just being paranoid but with the advancement of AI image processing it won't be long before we can be identified no matter where we are , what the time is , or what we're doing. Yes , the governments all roll out the "terrorism" line whenever questioned about this but we've all seen how its been abused already.
So whats next - infra red heat pattern signatures of individuals? Chemical piss analysis in public toilets?
If you scan both hands simultaneously, you can usually tell if the person is right or left-handed. The hand that is used more has a larger blood supply, bigger blood vessels.
It doesn't work on piano players, typists and some others who use both hands vigorously.
Ironically, a near infrared sensor (used for just this purpose - security) that I played with about 2 years ago had firmware which not only detected whether or not the hand (this one examined your palm) was severed but apparently had a method of detecting if the user was under stress (presumably this affects dilation and blood flow or something else observable in the spectrum) in order to prevent hostages from being used like this. Despite all the obvious problems with this, it was an interesting idea; however, apparently some people had problems using it at different times of the year because of this 'feature' or when in agitated or excitable states. Things are never as simple as they appear sadly...
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