Shedding Light on the Veins - Reflected Light or Transillumination in Hand-Vein Recognition

The near-infrared light source is a crucial part of a hand-vein scanner. Depending on its position there are two main illumination types: reflected light and transillumination. Commercial scanners and all publicly available data sets use reflected light. We established two dual illumination dorsal hand-vein data sets (one of them is made publicly available) including both, reflected light and transillumination images acquired using the same subjects, hand position and environmental conditions. This enables a direct comparison of both illumination scenarios as well as cross-illumination matching. Several experiments utilising common hand-vein recognition algorithms were carried out to quantify the recognition performance in each of the illumination scenarios and in the cross-illumination matching one.