Dorsal hand vein recognition based on 2D Gabor filters

Abstract

Hand vein patterns are among the biometric traits being investigated today for identification purposes, attracting interest from both the research community and industry. A reliable and robust personal verification approach using dorsal hand vein patterns is presented in this paper. This approach needs less computational and memory requirements and has a higher recognition accuracy than similar methods. In our work, a near-infrared charge-coupled device camera is adopted as an input device for capturing dorsal hand vein images, due to its advantages of the low-cost and non-contact imaging. In the proposed approach, two finger-peaks are automatically selected to define the region of interest in the dorsal hand vein images. In order to obtain effective pattern of dorsal hand vein vascular, we proposed an innovative and robust adaptive Gabor filter method to extract the dorsal hand vein patterns and encode the vein features in bit string representation. The bit string representation, called VeinCode, offers speedy template matching and enables more effective template storage and retrieval. The similarity of two VeinCodes is measured by normalised Hamming distance. A total of 6160 dorsal hand vein images were collected from 308 persons to verify the validity of the proposed dorsal hand vein recognition approach. High accuracies (>99%) have been obtained by the proposed method, and the speed of the method (responding time <0·8 s) is rapid enough for real-time recognition. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach is feasible and effective for dorsal hand vein recognition.