AI-Enhanced Vein Biometrics: A Comprehensive Survey

Abstract

Vein biometrics has emerged as a promising biometric modality for personal identity authentication, benefiting from its intrinsic properties such as high discriminative capability, resistance to forgery, and contactless acquisition. Recent advances in artificial intelligence, particularly deep learning, have significantly accelerated its development. This paper presents a comprehensive and systematic survey of AI-enhanced vein biometrics. We review fundamental principles, publicly available datasets, and evaluation protocols, and systematically analyze existing methods across the entire vein biometric pipeline, including acquisition, preprocessing, feature extraction, recognition and verification, security and privacy protection, and multimodal fusion. Furthermore, we summarize representative application scenarios, identify key challenges, and highlight promising directions for future research. To facilitate reproducible research and long-term development of the field, we release an open, evolving research resource Awesome-Vein-Biometrics that systematically summarizes and tracks recent advances in vein biometrics.