Finger-vein ROI localization and vein ridge enhancement

Finger-vein based biometrics, as a new approach to personal identification, has received much attention in recent years. However, the poor visibility of finger-vein imageries is really not beneficial for deepening the understanding of finger-vein characteristics. Moreover, unreliable finger-vein region of interest (ROI) localization can also heavily degrade the performance of a finger-vein based recognition system in practical scenario. Hence, in this paper, we first introduces a new and robust approach for finger-vein ROI localization, and then proposes a new scheme for effectively improving the visibility of finger-vein imageries. Extensive experiments are finally conducted to validate the proposed method. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.