Improved methods for finger vein identification using composite median-wiener filter and hierarchical centroid features extraction

Finger vein identification is a potential new area in biometric systems. Finger vein patterns contain highly discriminative characteristics, which are difficult to be forged because they reside underneath the skin of the finger and require a specific device to capture them. Research have been carried out in this field but there is still an unresolved issue related to low-quality data due to data capturing and processing. Low-quality data have caused errors in the feature extraction process and reduced identification performance rate in finger vein identification. To address this issue, a new image enhancement and feature extraction methods were developed to improve finger vein identification. The image enhancement, Composite Median-Wiener (CMW) filter would improve image quality and preserve the edges of the finger vein image. Next, the feature extraction method, Hierarchical Centroid Feature Method (HCM) was fused with statistical pixel-based distribution feature method at the feature-level fusion to improve the performance of finger vein identification. These methods were evaluated on public SDUMLA-HMT and FV-USM finger vein databases. Each database was divided into training and testing sets. The average result of the experiments conducted was taken to ensure the accuracy of the measurements. The k-Nearest Neighbor classifier with city block distance to match the features was implemented. Both these methods produced accuracy as high as 97.64% for identification rate and 1.11% of equal error rate (EER) for measures verification rate. These showed that the accuracy of the proposed finger vein identification method is higher than the one reported in the literature. As a conclusion, the results have proven that the CMW filter and HCM have significantly improved the accuracy of finger vein identification