Retinal Verification Using a Feature Points-Based Biometric Pattern

Biometrics refer to identity verification of individuals based on some physiologic or behavioural characteristics. The typical authentication process of a person consists in extracting a biometric pattern of him/her and matching it with the stored pattern for the authorised user obtaining a similarity value between patterns. In this work an efficient method for persons authentication is showed. The biometric pattern of the system is a set of feature points representing landmarks in the retinal vessel tree. The pattern extraction and matching is described. Also, a deep analysis of similarity metrics performance is presented for the biometric system. A database with samples of retina images from users on different moments of time is used, thus simulating a hard and real environment of verification. Even in this scenario, the system allows to establish a wide confidence band for the metric threshold where no errors are obtained for training and test sets. Copyright (C) 2009 M. Ortega et al.