An improved vein image segmentation algorithm based on SLIC and Niblack threshold method

Abstract

Subcutaneous vein images are often obtained by using the absorbency difference of near-infrared (NIR) light between vein and its surrounding tissue under NIR light illumination. Vein images with high quality are critical to biometric identification, which requires segmenting the vein skeleton from the original images accurately. To address this issue, we proposed a vein image segmentation method which based on simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC) method and Niblack threshold method. The SLIC method was used to pre-segment the original images into superpixels and all the information in superpixels were transferred into a matrix (Block Matrix). Subsequently, Niblack thresholding method is adopted to binarize Block Matrix. Finally, we obtained segmented vein images from binarized Block Matrix. According to several experiments, most part of vein skeleton is revealed compared to traditional Niblack segmentation algorithm.