Enhanced maximum curvature descriptors for finger vein verification

Maximum Curvature Method (MCM) is one of the promising methods for finger vein verification. MCM scans the curvature of the vein image profiles within a finger for feature extraction. However, the quality of the image can be poor due to variations in illumination and sensor conditions. Furthermore, traditional MCM matching of the vein pattern requires extensive processing time. To address these limitations, we propose an integrated Enhanced Maximum Curvature (EMC) method with Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG) descriptor for finger vein verification. Unlike MCM, EMC incorporates an enhancement mechanism to extract small vein delineation that is hardly visible in the extracted vein patterns. Next, HOG is applied instead of image binarization to convert a two-dimensional vein image into a one-dimensional feature vector for efficient matching. The HOG descriptor is able to characterize the local spatial representation of a finger vein by capturing the gradient information effectively. The proposed method is evaluated based on two datasets namely the PKU Finger Vein Database (V4) and SDUMLA-HMT finger vein database. Experiments show promising verification results with equal error rates as low as 0.33 % for DB1 and 0.14 % for DB2 respectively, when EMC+HOG+SVM is applied.