Patent ID: 8306609

Claim:
A vein imaging apparatus comprising: a lens array including a plurality of photo-receiving lenses; a plurality of near-infrared illumination sources placed along opposed ends of the lens array to illuminate a part of a living body including a vein with near-infrared light; an image pickup device to create a picked-up image of the vein based on the near-infrared light scattered inside the living body, transmitted through the vein and gathered by the lens array, the image pickup device including a plurality of photoreceptors allocated to each of the plurality of photo-receiving lenses; and a thumbnail image creation unit comprising a computing processor configured to: select, for each of the plurality of photo-receiving lenses included in the lens array, one photoreceptor among the plurality of photoreceptors, wherein a plurality of selected photoreceptors are in phase with one another, acquire information about the near-infrared light received by each of the selected photoreceptors as pixel information for each corresponding photo-receiving lens, and create a thumbnail image based on the acquired pixel information by combining the acquired pixel information.