Multi-Channel Gabor Filter Design for Finger-Vein Image Enhancement

Finger-vein recognition has been considered as one of the most convenient and effective biometric ways for personal identification. Extracting vein characteristics is crucial for finger-vein classification. However, the finger-vein extraction results always are greatly sensitive to noises due to the low contrast of finger-vein images. To robustly exploit real vein information, this paper proposes a novel method of finger-vein enhancement based on multi-channel Gabor filters. Firstly, multi-channel Gabor filters are used to prominently protrude vein vessel information with variances in widths and orientations in images. The vein information in different scales and orientations of Gabor filters is then combined together to generate an enhanced finger-vein image using a reconstruction rule. Experimental results show that the proposed method is capable of enhancing finger-vein images effectively and reliably.