Finger-vein verification based on the curvature in Radon space

Finger-vein verification has drawn increasing attention because it is highly secured and private biometric in practical applications. However, as the imaging environment is affected by many factors, the captured image contains not only the vein pattern but also the noise and irregular shadowing which can decrease the verification accuracy. To address this problem, in this paper, we proposed a new finger-vein extraction approach which detects the valley-like structures using the curvatures in Radon space. Firstly, given a pixel, we obtain eight patches centered on it by rotating a window along eight different orientations and project the resulting patches into Radon space using the Radon transform. Secondly, the vein patches create prominent valleys in Radon space. The vein patterns are enhanced according to the curvature values of the valleys. Finally, the vein network is extracted from the enhancing image by a binarization scheme and matched for personal verification. The experimental results on both contacted and contactless finger-vein databases illustrate that our approach can significantly improve the accuracy of the finger-vein verification system.