Palm vein recognition based on multi-sampling and feature-level fusion

For contactless palm vein images, particularly substantial changes in hand positioning between one image and the next, it is difficult to achieve a satisfactory recognition performance with geometry- or statistics-based methods due to issues such as non-uniform illumination and affine transformation. Therefore, with a multi-sampling and feature-level fusion strategy, a novel palm vein recognition method based on local invariant features is presented for addressing the aforementioned issues. As most of the contactless palm vein images are unclear and have low contrast, if a SIFT algorithm is directly adopted for feature extraction on the center region of a palm vein image, it will be difficult to obtain sufficient features for effective recognition. Therefore, in this paper, we first propose to take the entire palm as a Region of Interest (ROI) and perform new hierarchical enhancement on the ROI to ensure that additional features will be obtained from the subsequent feature extraction. Then, we take full advantage of the multiple samples collected in the registration stage to generate the registered template using feature-level fusion. Finally, bidirectional matching is proposed for mismatch removal. The experiments on the CASIA Palm vein Image Database and our palm vein database collected under the posture changes show that the proposed method was superior in terms of recognition performance, especially for palm vein image recognition under remarkable posture changes. In particular, the values of Equal Error Rate (EER) on the aforementioned two databases were 0.16% and 0.73%, respectively. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.