Recognition of Veins in Sclera for Human Identification

Abstract

The vein structure in the sclera, the white and opaque outer protective covering of the eye, is anecdotally stable over time and unique to each person. As a result, it is well suited for use as a biometric for human identification. Sclera recognition poses several challenges: the vein structure moves and deforms with the movement of the eye and its surrounding tissues; images of sclera patterns are often defocused and/or saturated; and, most importantly, the vein structure in the sclera is multi-layered and has complex non-linear deformation. Here proposed a new method for sclera recognition, a line descriptor along with feature extraction, registration, and matching method that is scale, orientation, and deformation invariant, and can mitigate the multi-layered deformation effects and tolerate segmentation error.