Retinal recognition: Personal identification using blood vessels

Biometrics are used for personal recognition based on some physiologic or behavioral characteristics. In this era, biometric security systems are widely used which mostly include fingerprint recognition, face recognition, iris and speech recognition etc. Retinal recognition based security systems are very rare due to retina acquisition problem but still it provides the most reliable and stable mean of biometric identification. This paper presents a four stage personal identification system using vascular pattern of human retina. In first step, it acquires and preprocesses the colored retinal image. Then blood vessels are enhanced and extracted using 2-D wavelet and adaptive thresholding respectively. In third stage, it performs feature extraction and filtration followed by vascular pattern matching in forth step. The proposed method is tested on three publicly available databases i.e DRIVE, STARE and VARIA. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieved an accuracy of 0.9485 and 0.9761 for vascular pattern extraction and personal recognition respectively.