Sony has decided that fingerprints are not individual enough for its new generation of biometrics and wants to get into the veins in the fingers.

The problem with fingerprints is that they can be stolen from things that the person has handled, so Sony reasons that the only way to make sure it that it really is the person's finger on the biometric tester is to scan the veins in the finger too.

A compact, camera-based system, "Mofiria", uses a CMOS sensor to diagonally capture scattered light inside the finger veins. Data from the pattern is compressed, making it possible for the information to be stored on gadgets like laptops or mobile phones.

Apparently the system is more secure than retinal scans. False rejection rate for the system 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.