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

We propose a method of personal identification based on finger-vein patterns. An image of a finger captured under infrared light contains not only the vein pattern but also irregular shading produced by the various thicknesses of the finger bones and muscles. The proposed method extracts the finger-vein pattern from the unclear image by using line tracking that starts from various positions. Experimental results show that it achieves robust pattern extraction, and the equal error rate was 0.145% in personal identification.Received: 27 October 2003, Accepted: 25 February 2004, Published online: 21 July 2004