Image restoration and enhancement for finger-vein recognition

Finger-vein recognition has been a hot topic in biometrics community. However, finger-vein images are always poor in quality. This is very unhelpful for finger-vein feature analysis in practice. Considering the light propagation behavior in biological tissue and the variations of veins in orientation and diameter, in this paper, we propose an effective finger-vein image enhancement method based on scattering removal and a bank of even Gabor filters. The experimental results show that the proposed method has a good performance in venous region enhancement and can improve the finger-vein recognition accuracy significantly.