A study of similarity between genetically identical body vein patterns

Vein patterns have been used in commercial biometric systems for many years and are recently considered for criminal authentication. Understanding the similarity between genetically identical vein patterns is important, especially when using them in legal cases involving identical twins. Vein patterns sharing the same Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequence are generally regarded as vein patterns with maximum similarity. If they are completely distinguishable, it implies that the uniqueness of vein patterns is high. Though the genetic dependence of other biometric traits, including fingerprints, faces, palmprints, and irises, have been studied, genetically identical vein patterns have not been studied systematically. With the help of an automatic vein pattern matching algorithm, this paper analyzes and measures the similarity between genetically identical vein patterns. 234 genetically identical forearm pairs and 204 genetically identical thigh pairs were collected for this study. Experimental results indicate that genetically identical vein patterns have extra similarity, but they are distinguishable.