Ultrasound wrist vein pattern for biometric recognition

Wrist vein patterns are acquiring increasing con-sideration in biometric recognition application. Optical and near infrared technologies provide only 2D information. In this work, 3D wrist vein patterns, extracted from grayscale ultrasound images, are evaluated for biometric recognition purposes. Both water and gel were experimented with as coupling medium; water provided better image quality. A procedure for extracting 3D vascula pattern was derived and evaluated both by comparison with C-mode image at various depth and through verification experiments on a limited number of samples. Preliminary. results were encouraging and showed that 3D templates provide better recognition performances than 2D ones.