Low contrast hand vein image enhancement

An image of hand vein acquired by near-infrared (NIR) imaging device usually suffers from low contrast and noise due to non-illumination and thickness of the hand skin. This makes subsequent processing such as segmentation difficult. In this work, combination of histogram-based and fuzzy-based contrast enhancement algorithms are applied on hand vein images. Comparative analysis on a test image using different contrast enhancement algorithms has shown that the Fuzzy Histogram Hyperbolization proposed method outperforms its counterparts.