Vein detection is an important issue for the medical field. There are some commercial devices for detecting
veins using infrared radiation. However, most of these commercial solutions are cost-prohibitive. Recently, veins
detection has attracted much attention from research teams. The main focus is on developing real-time systems with
low-cost hardware. Systems developed to reduce costs suffer from low frame rates. This, in turn, makes these systems
not suitable for real-world applications. On the other hand, systems that use powerful processors to produce high frame
rates suffer from high costs and a lack of mobility. In this paper, a real-time vein mapping prototype using augmented
reality is proposed. The proposed prototype provides a compromised solution to produce high frame rates with a lowcost
system. It consists of a USB camera attached to an Android smartphone used for real-time detection. Infrared
radiation is employed to differentiate the veins using 20 Infrared Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs). The captured frames
are processed to enhance vein detection using light computational algorithms to improve real-time processing and
increase frame rate. Finally, the enhanced view of veins appears on the smartphone screen. Portability and economic
cost are taken into consideration while developing the proposed prototype. The proposed prototype is tested with
people of different ages and gender, as well as using mobile devices of different specifications. The results show a
high vein detection rate and a high frame rate compared to other existing systems. |
