Sony today announced the development of a finger vein authentication technology called "mofiria" that can be used in future PCs or mobile devices. The technology offers quick response and high accuracy and comes in a compact size for mounting on mobile devices such as a personal computer or mobile phone, Sony claims.

Compared to other biometric authentication techniques, vein authentication technology achieves higher accuracy on personal identification and forgery resistance because it uses the veins inside the human body. Finger vein patterns differ from person to person, each finger to finger, and it is said that they do not change over the years.

"mofiria" uses a method where a CMOS sensor diagonally captures scattered light inside the finger veins, making a plane layout possible. As a result, a small and more flexible design can be realized in building this technology into mobile devices.

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The vein pattern is extracted from the captured finger vein image, and data from the pattern is compressed into the size of one-tenth to store in memory, which makes it possible for the data to be stored on a mobile device.

The vein pattern is quickly extracted from the captured finger vein image without a fixed finger position, as the position of a placed finger is automatically and simultaneously corrected.

Sony said that the authentication accuracy is less than 0.1% for the FRR (False Rejection Rate), less than 0.0001% for the FAR (False Acceptance Rate), and processing time for identification takes only about 0.015 sec using a personal computer CPU and about 0.25 sec when using a mobile phone CPU.

Sony plans to promote the "mofiria" technology for use in mobile devices, gateway security systems and solution services.

The company will commercialize the technology within the 2009 fiscal year.