Fast ultrasound palmprint and palm veins acquisition for biometric recognition

Hand-based characteristics such as palmprint and palm veins have been investigated mainly by optical and infrared technologies, but have the limit to acquire only 2D information. Ultrasound instead acquires 3D information and detects liveness. The present work proposes to acquire 3D palmprint and palm veins through ultrasound compound plane wave imaging (CPWI) with the aim of collecting faster and better resolute images. Several configurations were experimented with by varying parameters like number of compound waves, steering angle, F-number, pulse repetition frequency (PRF), and time gain compensation (TGC) to maximize contrast and resolution. Both slow and fast scan modalities were set to collect the volumetric image in 6 and 3 s, respectively. Results have shown an improvement of recognition capability with respect to a recent work demonstrating that CPWI approach can guarantee recognition performances at least comparable as those achivable with standard beamforming techniques. Preliminary experiments carried out in fast modality have shown that no loss of image quality and recognition performance is noted with respect to the slow modality.