Sony is going to roll out in Japan the FVA-U1, a USB finger vein authentication device based on the company’s mofiria technology. According Sony, the FVA-U1 is the world’s lightest and smallest finger vein authentication device. Thanks to the mofiria technology, the device offers quick response and high accuracy and comes in a compact size for mounting on mobile devices such as netbook, notebook or mobile phones.
Sony’s “mofiria” uses a CMOS sensor diagonally captures scattered light inside the finger veins, making a plane layout possible. 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.
Sony’s FVA-U1 will be released on 18 December 2009 for about 30,000 Yen.
Compared to the 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.
