Yu Lu

Finger vein is a new and secure biometric for personal authentication due to its line-structure network with abundant local and orientation features. However, these features cannot be well represented by the existing local descriptors. To effectively utilize these rich orientation features in finger vein images, this paper proposes a new local descriptor, namely, pyramid histogram of double competitive pattern (PHDCP). For a finger vein image, the PHDCP first obtains a bank of filtered images using Gabor filters with large kernel size and rich orientations, by which the local line features are captured. Then, the orientation orders with the largest and smallest responses, which are the most robust features, are selected to generate an encoded map. Finally, a column-partition-based pyramid histogram extraction method is presented to capture the hierarchical features from the encoded image. Numerical experiments are conducted on two public finger vein data sets, MMCBNU_6000 and UTFVP. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed PHDCP performs much better than the existing local descriptors.

Finger vein recognition has been considered one of the most promising biometrics for personal authentication. However, the capacities and percentages of finger tissues (e.g., bone, muscle, ligament, water, fat, etc.) vary person by person. This usually causes poor quality of finger vein images, therefore degrading the performance of finger vein recognition systems (FVRSs). In this paper, the intrinsic factors of finger tissue causing poor quality of finger vein images are analyzed, and an intensity variation (IV) normalization method using guided filter based single scale retinex (GFSSR) is proposed for finger vein image enhancement. The experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in enhancing the image quality and finger vein recognition accuracy.

Taking advantage of the three‐dimensional (3D) structure of finger veins located inside a finger, a novel finger vein identification system (FVIS) using two cameras with different fusion techniques is proposed. Compared with the traditional single‐camera‐based FVIS, the proposed system can generate more discriminative information by fusing information from two simultaneous captured images and can enhance the matching accuracy. Experimental results obtained using the authors' established database containing 436 fingers from 109 subjects verify the feasibility of the proposed system.

Finger vein has been proved to be an effective biometric for personal identification in recent years. Inspired by the good power of Gabor filter in capturing specific texture characteristics from any orientation of an image, this paper proposes a simple, yet powerful and efficient local descriptor for finger vein recognition, called histogram of competitive Gabor responses (HCGR). Specially, HCGR is based on a set of competitive Gabor response (CGR) which consists of two components: competitive Gabor magnitude (CGM) and competitive Gabor orientation (CGO). A set of CGR includes the information on magnitude and orientation of the maximum responses of the Gabor filter bank with a number of different orientations. For a given image, we calculate its CGM image and CGO image and represent them in a concatenated histogram, called HCGR. This histogram can efficiently and effectively exploit the discriminative orientation and local features in a finger vein image. The experimental results obtained on our publically available finger vein image database MMCBNU_6000 demonstrate that the proposed HCGR outperforms the classical local operators such as Gabor, steerable, histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) and local binary pattern (LBP).

Finger vein images are rich in orientation and edge features. Inspired by the edge histogram descriptor proposed in MPEG-7, this paper presents an efficient orientation-based local descriptor, named histogram of salient edge orientation map (HSEOM). HSEOM is based on the fact that human vision is sensitive to edge features for image perception. For a given image, HSEOM first finds oriented edge maps according to predefined orientations using a well-known edge operator and obtains a salient edge orientation map by choosing an orientation with the maximum edge magnitude for each pixel. Then, subhistograms of the salient edge orientation map are generated from the nonoverlapping submaps and concatenated to build the final HSEOM. In the experiment of this paper, eight oriented edge maps were used to generate a salient edge orientation map for HSEOM construction. Experimental results on our available finger vein image database, MMCBNU_6000, show that the performance of HSEOM outperforms that of state-of-the-art orientation-based methods (e.g., Gabor filter, histogram of oriented gradients, and local directional code). Furthermore, the proposed HSEOM has advantages of low feature dimensionality and fast implementation for a real-time finger vein recognition system.