Improving hand vein recognition by score weighted fusion of wavelet-domain multi-radius local binary patterns

Among biometric modalities, hand vein patterns are seen as providing an attractive method for high-level security access applications owing to high impenetrability and good user convenience. For biometric recognition based on near-infrared dorsal hand vein images, Local Binary Patterns (LBP) have emerged as a highly effective descriptor of local image texture with high recognition performance reported. In this paper, the traditional approach with LBP applied in the spatial domain is extended to multi-radius LBP in the wavelet domain to provide a more comprehensive set of feature categories to capture grey-level variation characteristics of vein patterns, and score weighted fusion based on the relative discriminative power of each feature category is proposed to achieve higher recognition performance. The proposed methodology is shown to provide a more robust performance with a recognition rate in excess of 99% and an equal error rate significantly less than 2%

Method for estimating potential recognition capacity of texture-based biometrics

When adopting an image-based biometric system, an important factor for consideration is its potential recognition capacity, since it not only defines the potential number of individuals likely to be identifiable, but also serves as a useful figure-of-merit for performance. Based on block transform coding commonly used for image compression, this study presents a method to enable coarse estimation of potential recognition capacity for texture-based biometrics. Essentially, each image block is treated as a constituent biometric component, and image texture contained in each block is binary coded to represent the corresponding texture class. The statistical variability among the binary values assigned to corresponding blocks is then exploited for estimation of potential recognition capacity. In particular, methodologies are proposed to determine appropriate image partition based on separation between texture classes and informativeness of an image block based on statistical randomness. By applying the proposed method to a commercial fingerprint system and a bespoke hand vein system, the potential recognition capacity is estimated to around 10^36 for a fingerprint area of 25  mm^2 which is in good agreement with the estimates reported, and around 10^15 for a hand vein area of 2268  mm^2 which has not been reported before

Personal identification based on multiple keypoint sets of dorsal hand vein images

This paper presents a biometric identification system based on near-infrared imaging of dorsal hand veins and matching of the keypoints that are extracted from the dorsal hand vein images by the scale-invariant feature transform. The whole system is covered in detail, which includes the imaging device used, image processing methods proposed for geometric correction, region-of-interest extraction, image enhancement and vein pattern segmentation, as well as image classification by extraction and matching of keypoints. In addition to several constraints introduced to minimise incorrectly matched keypoints, a particular focus is placed on the use of multiple training images of each hand class to improve the recognition performance for a large database with more than 200 hand classes. By organising multiple keypoint sets extracted from multiple training images of each hand class into three sets, namely, the union, the intersection and the exclusion, based on their inter-class and intra-class relationships, this study shows the contribution made by each set to the recognition performance and demonstrates the feasibility of achieving 100% correct recognition by combining the three sets, based on the experiments conducted using more than 2000 dorsal hand vein images