The Two Sides of the Finger - An Evaluation on the Recognition Performance of Dorsal vs. Palmar Finger-Veins

Vascular pattern (vein) based biometrics, especially finger- and hand-vein recognition gain more and more attention. In finger-vein recognition, the images are usually captured from the palmar (bottom) side of the finger. Dorsal (top) side finger vein recognition has not got much attention so far. In this paper we establish a new, publicly available, two-sided (dorsal and palmar) finger-vein data set. The data set is captured using two custom designed finger vein scanners, one based on near-infrared LED illumination, the other one on near-infrared laser modules. A recognition performance comparison between the single subsets (palmar and dorsal) as well as cross-subset (palmar vs. dorsal) comparison is conducted using several well-established finger-vein recognition schemes. The experimental results confirm that the palmar side achieves the overall best recognition performance but in general the dorsal side works better due to inherent finger texture information.