On the Feasibility of Post-Mortem Hand-Based Vascular Biometric Recognition.

Recently, there is a growing interest to employ biometrics in postmortem forensics, mainly to replace cost intensive radiology based imaging devices. While it has been shown that post-mortem biometric recognition is feasible for fingerprints, face and iris, no studies regarding post-mortem vasculature pattern recognition have been published. Based on the first reported post-mortem hand- and finger-vein dataset, the hypothesis, that hand vasculature biometrics can be used as post-mortem biometric modality, is falsified. Using an indirect proof, it is shown that no usable vascular features are present in the small amount of sample data collected, by visual inspection as well as by applying several biometric quality metrics, which confirm that hand-based vasculature biometrics can not be used as post-mortem biometric modality.