A preliminary acclimatization study of a contactless biometrics using palm vein feature

This paper presents an acclimatization and habituation test to evaluate the usability of a contactless hand biometric system from the user's perspective. As contactless hand-based biometrics is a relatively new technology, it is important to investigate the difficulty level, and the period it takes for the user to get accustomed to the appropriate mode of interacting with the sensor. Understanding how the users get habituated with the device is the key to the success of the biometric system in real-world application. In this research, palm vein biometrics is adopted as the domain of investigation. This modality is selected due to its promising accuracy rate. We propose a novel image quality assessment scheme to evaluate the quality of the input images. Sometimes, the vein images may not appear clear due to the medical condition of the skin (like thick fatty tissue obstructing the subcutaneous blood vessels), thus, it is not appropriate to accept the poor quality images into our system. This quality checking component is placed in both the enrollment and verification phases to scrutinize the image before taking it for further process. The performance of our system can be largely improved by eliminating many poor quality images.