Computer scientists and electrical engineers have developed an affordable hyperspectral camera that uses both visible and invisible near-infrared light to “see” beneath surfaces and capture unseen details.
This type of camera is typically used in industrial applications and can cost between several thousand to tens of thousands of dollars.
In a paper presented at the UbiComp 2015 conference, the team describes a hardware solution that costs roughly $800, or potentially as little as $50 to add to a mobile phone camera. They also developed intelligent software that easily finds “hidden” differences between what the hyperspectral camera captures and what’s visible to the naked eye.
When HyperCam captured images of a person’s hand, for instance, they revealed detailed vein and skin texture patterns that are unique to that individual. That can aid in everything from gesture recognition to biometrics to distinguishing between two different people playing the same video game.
As a preliminary investigation of HyperCam’s utility as a biometric tool, in a test of 25 different users, the system was able differentiate between hand images of users with 99 percent accuracy.
