Palm vein recognition using adaptive Gabor filter

Vein pattern recognition is one of the newest biometric techniques researched today. One of the reliable and robust personal identification authentication approaches using palm vein patterns is presented in this paper. In our work, we consider the palm vein as a piece of texture and apply texture-based feature extraction techniques to palm vein authentication. A Gabor filter provides the optimized resolution in both the spatial and frequency domains, thus it is a basis for extracting local features in the palm vein recognition. However, Gabor filter has many potential parameter combinations to use, and it is a common practice now to use multiple Gabor filters or to determine desired single combination by experience. The overall aim of this work is to discuss the optimization algorithm that determines the best parameter values of a single Gabor filter for palm vein recognition. In order to obtain effective pattern of palm vascular, we proposed an innovative and robust adaptive Gabor filter method to encode the palm 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 normalized Hamming distance. A total of 4140 palm vein images were collected form 207 persons to verify the validity of the proposed palm vein recognition approach. High accuracy has been obtained by the proposed method and the speed of this method is rapid enough for real-time palm vein recognition. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach is feasible and effective in palm vein recognition.

► A reliable personal verification approach using palm vein patterns is presented.
► We constructed the low-cost and non-contact NIR palm vein image database.
► We proposed an innovative and robust adaptive Gabor filter to extract the vein patterns.
► The vein features, called VeinCode, offers speedy matching and enables more effective storage.
► High accuracies have been obtained and the speed is rapid enough for real-time vein recognition.