A Thermal Vein Pattern Verification System

Abstract

Many biometrics, such as face, fingerprint and iris images, have been studied extensively for personal verification purposes in the past few decades. However, verification using vein patterns is less developed compared to other human traits. A new personal verification system using the thermal-imaged vein pattern in the back of the hand is presented in the paper. The system consists of five individual steps:Data Acquisition, Image Enhancement, Vein Pattern Segmentation, Skeletonization and Matching. Unlike most biometric systems that carry out comparisons based on a pre-selected feature set, this system directly recognizes the shapes of the vein pattern by measuring their Line-Segment Hausdorff Distance. Preliminary testing on a database containing 108 different images has been carried out and all the images are correctly recognized.