Singular value decomposition based minutiae matching method for finger vein recognition

Recently, finger vein recognition has received considerable attention in the biometric recognition field. Originating from fingerprint recognition, minutiae-based methods are recognized as an important branch, which attempts to discover minutia patterns from finger vein images for matching and recognition. However, the accuracy of these methods is generally unsatisfactory. One of the most challenging problems is that, the correspondences of two minutia sets are difficult to obtain resulting from the rotation, translation and deformation of the finger vein images. Another critical problem is that, the current available feature descriptors for minutia representation are weak and insufficient. In this paper, we propose SVDMM, a singular value decomposition (SVD)-based minutiae matching method for finger vein recognition, which involves three stages: (I) minutia pairing, (II) false removing and (III) score calculating. In particular, stage I discovers minutia pairs via SVD-based decomposition of the correlation-weighted proximity matrix. Stage II removes false pairs based on the local extensive binary pattern (LEBP) for increasing the reliability of the correspondences. Stage III determines the matching score of the input and template images by the 'average' matching degree of all their precise minutia pairs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our work not only performs better than the similar works in the literature, but also has great potential to achieve comparable performance to other categories of state-of-the-art methods. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.