Hitachi has announced that it has developed a new system that would allow smartphone cameras to scan finger veins, allowing for a mode of mobile biometric authentication that it says is even more secure than fingerprint scanning.
It doesn’t require the kind of infrared sensors traditionally needed for vascular scanning; all it needs is a conventional smartphone camera. And right now, it’s available in the form of an app that can scan users’ finger vein patterns in roughly one second. Hitachi says it’s aiming to have a commercial version ready in one or two years.
By then the mobile biometrics landscape is on track to look very different than it does today. While there have been some criticisms of current smartphones’ capacitive fingerprint sensors’ susceptibility to spoofing, some OEMs are starting to move on to the more accurate and secure scanning of ultrasonic fingerprint sensors. Meanwhile, Samsung has been pushing the concept of iris scanning for its new mobile devices, and Apple is rumored to be preparing to follow suit. That could make iris the next major mobile biometric modality, adding a new type of biometrics to the increasingly multimodal arena of mobile biometrics. With Hitachi’s system still in development it’s too soon to speculate about how it might compare to other modalities currently available, but it’s a fair bet that it will enter into an increasingly diverse consuer biometrics market.
Sources: Borneo Post Online, The Asahi Shimbun
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October 25, 2016 – by Alex Perala
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