New Finger-vein Recognition Method Based on Image Quality Assessment

Abstract

The performance of finger-vein recognition methods is limited by camera optical defocusing, the light-scattering effect of skin, and individual variations in the skin depth, density, and thickness of vascular patterns. Consequently, all of these factors may affect the image quality, but few studies have conducted quality assessments of finger-vein images. Therefore, we developed a new finger-vein recognition method based on image quality assessment. This research is novel compared with previous methods in four respects. First, the vertical cross-sectional profiles are extracted to detect the approximate positions of vein regions in a given finger-vein image. Second, the accurate positions of the vein regions are detected by checking the depth of the vein's profile using various depth thresholds. Third, the quality of the finger-vein image is measured by using the number of detected vein points in relation to the depth thresholds, which allows individual variations of vein density to be considered for quality assessment. Fourth, by assessing the quality of input finger-vein images, inferior-quality images are not used for recognition, thereby enhancing the accuracy of finger-vein recognition. Experiments confirmed that the performance of finger-vein recognition systems that incorporated the proposed quality assessment method was superior to that of previous methods.