Vein Pattern Extraction Using Near Infrared Imaging for Biometric Purposes

Abstract

Biomedical verification has been broadly examined for many years and pulled in much consideration because of its huge potential security application. Vein is less prone to damage and almost improbable to copy than any other physiological as well as behavioural biometric features such as fingerprint, iris, face and voice recognition. This paper proposes an efficient vein extraction method on low quality vein images taken by a camera absorbing near infrared light (NIR camera). At first, the image is contrast enhanced using contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE); secondly, local threshold method is applied on small blocks of the image followed by several morphological operations such as fill, erosion, dilation, clean and bridge, performed sequentially, for better accuracy. Experimental results obtained for extraction show that the proposed method can reap better results with reduced complexity. After extraction, matching of the test image with the template images stored in the database are matched using minutiae (point-to-point pattern). An orientation detector which filters out missing or unnecessary or unnatural spurious minutiae pairings while simultaneously using path or ridge orientations to increase performance and similarity score calculation. Thus the obtained processed images can be used in biometric purposes which in turn enhances the security of the system