3D ultrasound palm vein recognition through the centroid method for biometric purposes

In this work, a new method for extracting palm vein pattern is proposed. The procedure uses as input the 3D ultrasound images of a portion of the hand volume acquired with a fast and reliable system recently proposed. The method detects low brightness areas in B-mode images and then selects the vectors that specify the centers of mass of these dark regions (centroids). Vein patterns are defined whenever centroids are found in the surrounding of the same coordinates for a certain number of consecutive B-mode images. A first validation of the method was achieved by extracting a single vein pattern for several samples and performing verification experiments with two different matching approaches.