Feature extraction of finger vein patterns based on iterative line tracking and its application to personal identification

The research group of which the authors are members has proposed a scheme based on finger vein patterns as a scheme of biometric identification utilizing biological information. Since the finger vein images taken to obtain finger vein patterns are obtained by irradiating the fingers with infrared rays, fluctuations in brightness due to variations in the light power or the thickness of the finger occur. This paper proposes a scheme for extracting global finger vein patterns by iteratively tracking local lines from various positions to robustly extract finger vein patterns from such unclear images. The proposed scheme is robust against brightness fluctuations as compared with the conventional feature extraction schemes and the results of evaluating the proposed scheme by applying it to a personal identification system showed an effective error rate of 0.145p. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 35(7): 61–71, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (). DOI 10.1002sscj.10596