Why Vein Recognition Needs Privacy Protection

This paper describes the emerging biometric modality of vein recognition and privacy concerns that arise with its widespread use. Current sensors are able to capture vein patterns inside the human body, this is considered as a private biometric characteristic. In fact two medical disease patterns are presented that can be extracted from the vein patterns. In order to be compliant with data privacy protection laws privacy enhancing mechanisms have to be applied in vein recognition systems. Experiments of applying the helper data scheme to a back-hand vein database were conducted with remarkable results. A privacy-enhanced verification system can be realized, which shows good biometric performance under laboratory conditions.