Hasta La Gadget!

Fingerprint and vein scanners in computers are widespread enough that they no longer have to carry an "as seen on Minority Report or Total Recall" tag.

Now Sony has announced it has developed a compact, finger vein authentication technology that it says will be available in laptops and mobile phones later this year.

The authentication technology, puzzlingly named ‘mofiria,’ is expected to have higher accuracy compared to other personal identification techniques, says Sony.

Passwords have been passé for awhile as PC makers have added biometric authentication technologies such as fingerprint scans and palm authentication to PC systems. Sony’s rival Hitachi has had its finger vein authentication products available since last year, while Fujitsu offers a palm scan technology for both computers and general building access systems. That said, most users are probably still entering passwords to unlock their computers, even if biometric scanners are available on their machines. Why? It’s not clear, though it might be that existing technologies are too unreliable, not well-understood by the average user, or perhaps simply too creepy.

The ‘mofiria’ tech from Sony offers quick response and high accuracy and comes in a
compact size for mounting on mobile devices, says the company. It uses a CMOS sensor that diagonally captures
scattered light inside the finger veins making a plane layout
possible. This allows for a small and flexible design to be integrated into mobile devices.

"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," said Sony in a statement.

Sony claims false rejection rate for the technology is less than 0.1 percent and
processing time for identification takes only about 0.015 seconds using a
personal computer CPU and about 0.25 seconds using a mobile phone
CPU.