Hitachi helps you give work the finger

REMEMBER THE HITACHI palm reading security system we told you about a few years ago? Well, we have seen it off and on since then, and it has gone from a rough but functional device to a finished product. Now we see the next step, the finger vein biometric security device.

There isn't really much to say here, it does a lot of the same things. It reads where the veins in your finger are and compares that to a database just like the palm print reader. It scans a smaller area so it is faster and the resultant scan takes less storage space.

You can also embed the scan on a smart card so that when you put the card in a lock, it verifies you against the scan on the card locally, no central database lookup needed.

As is normal for a generational advance, Hitachi is claiming lower false positive and false negative rates. If you use 1:1 lookups instead of a central server, it drops the false positives to almost zero. µ