Biometric identification using knee X-rays.

Identification of people often makes use of unique features of the face, fingerprints and retina. Beyond this, a similar identifying process can be applied to internal parts of the body that are not visible to the unaided eye. Here we show that knee X-rays can be used for the identification of individual persons. The image analysis method is based on the wnd-charm algorithm, which has been found effective for the diagnosis of clinical conditions of knee joints. Experimental results show that the rank-10 identification accuracy using a dataset of 425 individuals is ~56%, and the rank-1 accuracy is ~34%. The dataset contained knee X-rays taken several years apart from each other, showing that the identifiable features correspond to specific persons, rather than the present clinical condition of the joint.