An Efficient Enhancement Method for Finger Vein Images Using Double Histogram Equalization

Abstract

With the advent of latest technological breakthroughs, it has become quite an easy feat to hack the commonly used biometrics such as face, voice and fingerprint etc. This has led to the exploration of new vistas in this domain.One of the most secure biometrics of today is finger vein- but this high degree of security comes with its own challenges, the most prominent one being that the vein pattern is extremely difficult to extract because finger vein images are always low in quality, gravely hampering the feature extraction and classification stages. Sophisticated algorithms need to be designed for this purpose. The aim of this paper is to present a computationally light-weight yet highly efficient procedure that can be used to extract the vascular pattern from a person’s finger illuminated by infrared radiation.Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method is not only efficiently lightweight with regard to computational time but also achieves state –of-the art results by clearly bringing out the enhanced vascular pattern beneath finger skin