Dorsal hand vein recognition based on 2D

Gabor filters
J.-C. Lee*1, C.-H. Lee2, C.-B. Hsu3, P.-Y. Kuei3 and K.-C. Chang3
Hand vein patterns are among the biometric traits being investigated today for identification
purposes, attracting interest from both the research community and industry. A reliable and
robust personal verification approach using dorsal hand vein patterns is presented in this paper.
This approach needs less computational and memory requirements and has a higher recognition
accuracy than similar methods. In our work, a near-infrared charge-coupled device camera is
adopted as an input device for capturing dorsal hand vein images, due to its advantages of the
low-cost and non-contact imaging. In the proposed approach, two finger-peaks are automatically
selected to define the region of interest in the dorsal hand vein images. In order to obtain effective
pattern of dorsal hand vein vascular, we proposed an innovative and robust adaptive Gabor filter
method to extract the dorsal hand vein patterns and encode the vein features in bit string
representation. The bit string representation, called VeinCode, offers speedy template matching
and enables more effective template storage and retrieval. The similarity of two VeinCodes is
measured by normalised Hamming distance. A total of 6160 dorsal hand vein images were
collected from 308 persons to verify the validity of the proposed dorsal hand vein recognition
approach. High accuracies (.99%) have been obtained by the proposed method, and the speed
of the method (responding time ,0?8 s) is rapid enough for real-time recognition. Experimental
results demonstrate that our proposed approach is feasible and effective for dorsal hand vein
recognition.
Keywords: Biometrics, Dorsal hand vein recognition, Adaptive Gabor filter, Hamming distance

Introduction verification. Each of these systems has merits and

In this age of digital impersonation, biometric techni-
ques are being used increasingly as a hedge against
identity theft. The premise is that a biometric a
measurable physical characteristic or behavioural trait
is a more reliable indicator of identity than
traditional methods. Traditional personal verification
methods rely heavily on the use of passwords, personal
identification numbers, magnetic swipe cards, keys,
smart cards, etc. No matter which method is employed,
each of these offers only limited security. Many
biometric recognition systems have been proposed,
based on various human physiological features or
behaviours including facial images, hand geometry,
fingerprints, palm prints, retinal images, handwritten
signature and gait,1 to improve the security of personal
1
Department of Electrical Engineering, Chinese Naval Academy,
Kaohsiung 813, Taiwan
2
Department of Information Communication, Mingdao University,
Changhua 523, Taiwan
3
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Chung Cheng
Institute of Technology, National Defense University, Taoyuan 335,
Taiwan
*Corresponding author, email i923002@gmail.com
demerits. In the case of fingerprints, direct contact of
the finger with the fingerprint-image-extracting sensor
causes degradation in performance, especially in factory
construction sites where good-quality fingerprints are
hard to obtain due to oil from the finger, moisture, dirt,
etc. For retina scanners, users must place their eye close
to the scanner, causing an uncomfortable feeling of
invasion of privacy. With hand-shape recognition
devices, problems may arise with users who suffer from
arthritis or rheumatism, leading to poor performance.
The method of dorsal hand vein recognition has been
developed to resolve these problems. Since it acquires a
dorsal hand vein pattern image without direct contact
with the dorsal hand or with the vein pattern-extracting
sensor, there is no contamination. Both user comfort
and performance are improved, and stable operation is
expected. Vein recognition appeared in the 1990s,2 and
has been popular since 2000 because of the advantages it
offers. A vein pattern reveals the vast network of blood
vessels underneath a persons skin. Like fingerprints,
though it has never been proven in a strict scientific
sense, the shape of the vascular patterns of different
individuals are believed to be distinctive,2,3 and very
stable over a long period of time. In addition, as the
blood vessels are hidden underneath the skin and are

2014 RPS
Received 5 July 2012; accepted 13 December 2012
DOI 10.1179/1743131X12Y.0000000049 The Imaging Science Journal 2014 VOL 62 NO 3 127
Lee et al. Dorsal hand vein recognition based on 2D gabor filters
mostly invisible to the human eye, vein patterns are
much harder for intruders to copy compared to other
biometric features. The properties of uniqueness, stabi-
lity and strong immunity to forgery of the vein pattern
make it a potentially good biometric which offers secure
and reliable features for personal identity verification.
As a result of the Fujitsu research4 using data from
140 000 palms (70 000 individuals), Fujitsu has con-
firmed that the false acceptance rate (FAR) is 0?00008%
and the false rejection rate (FRR) is 0?01%, with the
following condition: a person must hold the palm
over the sensor for three scans during registration, and
then only one final scan is permitted to confirm
authentication.
In this paper, we present a novel dorsal hand vein
recognition method for personal identification. There
are many different features in dorsal hand vein images,
such as the geometry pattern, the principal line and the
delta point. Furthermore, hand veins show significant
textural differences and a lot of minutiae similar to the
ridges and branches of fingerprints.57 These features
offer stable, unique and reliable biometrics for personal
identification. Many verification technologies using
biometric features of hand veins have been developed
over the past decades.515 Lin and Fan8 presented
personal verification results using palm dorsal images
acquired from a thermal infrared (IR) camera operating
in the 3?45?0 mm range. Their approach is based on the
combination of multiresolution images obtained from
pre-processed thermal vein images. Wang and Leedham9
present another approach for personal authentication
using hand vein images acquired from thermal imaging.
The authors9,10 have employed Hausdorff distance to
generate matching scores between the extracted line
patterns and illustrated promising results. In another
paper, Wang et al.7 compared shape- and texture-based
methods for vein recognition, with shape similarity
measured via Hausdorff distance and line edge map
(LEM), and texture similarity measured via Euclidean
distance of Gabor magnitude features. In a dataset of
100 persons, Hausdorff, LEM and Gabor-based meth-
ods achieved accuracies of 58, 66 and 80%, respectively.
Wang et al.11 proposed a multimodal personal identifi-
cation system where palmprint and palm vein modalities
were combined in a single image. Locality preserving
projection was used to extract features of the fused
images, which they called Laplacianpalm. Kumar and
Prathyusha12 presented a new approach to authenticate
individuals using triangulation of hand vein images and
simultaneously extract the knuckle shape information.
Wang et al.13 proposed a hand-dorsal vein recognition
method based on partition local binary pattern and
assessed using a similarity measure obtained by calculat-
ing the Chi square statistic between the feature vectors
of the tested sample and the target sample. Crisan
et al.14 focussed on improving the two essential parts of
a vein-scanning device: the hardware lighting system and
the feature extraction algorithms. Hsu et al.15 success-
fully used modified two-directional two-dimensional
(2D) principal component analysis to obtain eigenveins,
which is a low dimensional representation of vein
pattern features. Fujitsus4 palm vein verification pro-
duct has high accuracy, but to the best of our knowl-
edge, the features used have not been disclosed in any
published research articles. Although these authors
128 The Imaging Science Journal 2014 VOL 62 NO
claimed that the features that they used to recognise
the vein patterns can attain a high level of accuracy,
most of them used only small datasets to evaluate the
performance of the hand vein recognition, so the
practical feasibility of these algorithms have not been
demonstrated. There is currently no publicly available
hand vein pattern database available to the research
community.10 To demonstrate the robustness of the
proposed approach, we constructed our own near-
infrared (NIR) dorsal hand vein image database, which
has 308 participants and contains 6160 dorsal hand vein
pattern images. It is based on a non-contact, non-
invasive data acquisition method and requires no
injection of any agents into the blood vessels.
Therefore, it is by far the best-known non-invasive
option for acquiring dorsal hand vein pattern images.
Currently, dorsal hand vein recognition methods are
known as two types, geometric approaches and holistic
approaches. Geometric approaches extract local features
such as the locations and local statistics of the principal
veins, minutiae points and ridge bifurcations. Holistic
methods, which represent intrinsic attributes of an
image, can be extracted based on various algebraic
transforms and matrix decompositions. In general,
dorsal hand veins consist of some significant textures
and a lot of minutiae similar to the ridges and branches
of palmprint. These features offer stable, unique and
reliable biometric for personal identification. In this
paper, we consider the dorsal hand vein as a piece of
texture and apply texture feature extraction techniques
to dorsal hand vein authentication.
Gabor filter works as a bandpass filter for the local
spatial frequency distribution, achieving an optimal
resolution in both spatial and frequency domains.
Daugman16 explains how 2D Gabor filter can attain
the combined optimised resolution in space and
frequency. Namely, it can adjust the direction and
frequency band width when doing space localisation.
This characteristic is very useful for analysing the
texture of images. The method has been successful-
ly used in texture segmentation and classification,17
fingerprint recognition,18 face recognition,19 palmprint
recognition,20 iris recognition,21 etc. In Ref. 20, multiple
elliptical Gabor filters with different orientations are
employed to extract the phase information on a
palmprint image, which is then merged according to a
fusion rule to produce a single feature called the fusion
code. Daugmans algorithm21 adopted 2D Gabor filters
to demodulate iris phase information. The Hamming
distance was further used to calculate the distance
between iris codes of 2048 bits. Although 2D Gabor
filters are widely adopted, the performance of the
method that applied 2D Gabor filters suffers from
parameter dependency that need to be set properly.
Therefore, the method of adaptive Gabor filter (AGF) is
proposed to extract local vein patterns for dorsal hand
vein recognition. In this paper, the AGF involves the
selection of a suitable parameter at different orientations
and frequencies to extract the dorsal hand vein patterns
for personal identification authentication. Based on the
orientation adaptive and frequency adaptive, 2D Gabor
filter can duly change its parameters and achieve
the performance. Thus, by the analysis and decom-
position of 2D Gabor filter, we propose a simplified
method to determine some parameters, including centre
3

1 Block diagram of the proposed dorsal hand vein recognition system
frequency u, filter orientation h, as well as space
envelope s, to accomplish and realise a good perfor-
mance. Experimental results on our own NIR dorsal
hand vein image database, including more than 300
classes, have demonstrated that the proposed method is
highly feasible and effective for personal identification.
The rest of this paper is organised as follows. We will
briefly introduce the dorsal hand vein image collection
device and process in Section 2. The preprocessing and
extracting of the location of region of interest (ROI) are
addressed in Section 3. A detailed description of the
proposed method for dorsal hand vein recognition is
given in Section 4. The construction of the dorsal hand
vein database is presented in Section 5. Experimental
results are presented and discussed in Section 6 to verify
the validity of the proposed approach. Finally, conclud-
ing remarks are given in Section 7.
A block diagram of the proposed approach is shown
in Fig. 1. Firstly, the dorsal hand vein images are
captured by an NIR camera as the input data. Then, two
finger-peaks are automatically selected as the datum
points to define the ROI in the dorsal hand vein images.
Next, 2D Gabor filter was used on the vein pattern to
extract features. To obtain useful representation of the
dorsal hand vein modalities, we propose an innovative
and robust AGF method to set the best parameter
values of a single Gabor filter and encode the dorsal
hand vein features in bit string representation. Finally,
the Hamming distance is employed to measure the
similarity of two VeinCodes and verify whether the
template and testing samples are captured from the same
person or not.
Dorsal hand verin image collection
In visible light, the vein structure of the dorsal hand is
not always easily discernible. The visibility of the vein
structure varies significantly depending on factors such
as age, level of subcutaneous fat, ambient temperature
and humidity, physical activity and hand position. In
addition, a multitude of other factors including surface
features such as moles, warts, scars, pigmentation and
hair can also cause great effect upon the image
acquisition. Up to now, there has been no publicly
available hand vein pattern database provided to the
research community.10 In order to perform a prelimin-
ary analysis on the features of the dorsal hand vein
pattern, we constructed our own NIR dorsal hand vein
image database. In this work, a low-cost NIR charge-
coupled device (CCD) camera, traditionally used for
surveillance, was employed as the non-contact image
acquired system. Though principally designed for use in
Lee et al. Dorsal hand vein recognition based on 2D gabor filters
visible light, CCD cameras are also sensitive to NIR
wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum up to
nearly 1100 nm. This is within the actinic IR range,
which covers the NIR spectrum from 700 to 1400 nm.
This wavelength also lies in the medical spectral window
(700900 nm) in which the illumination penetrates
deeper into the biological tissues.22 In our work, the
near IR illumination (LEDs) is evenly and circularly
located around the camera, producing a peak at 750 nm
wavelength. In addition to the LEDs, another important
part of this system is an infrared filter. To eliminate the
effect of visible light, an optical IR filter was mounted in
front of the cameras lens. For our data collection, a
Hoya RM72 IR filter was used. Since there are no
docking devices to constrain the participants hand, it
can be used for either the right or left hand. The hand is
presented as a clenched fist with the thumb and all the
other fingers are hidden. During the collection of the
images for the database, we restricted the position where
the participants placed their hands below the camera.
The distance between the hand and the camera was
adjusted to approximately 20 cm for the best acquisi-
tion. At this distance, there is acceptable tolerance for
positioning and rotating the dorsal hand within the
specified region. This database is an extended version of
the database reported in Ref. 15. The acquisition system
of a typical non-contact dorsal hand vein image is shown
in Fig. 2.
Using the NIR light source and the IR filter, the
image on the CCD sensor is a high-quality image of the
2 The acquisition of a typical non-contact is utilised to
capture the dorsal hand vein images
The Imaging Science Journal 2014 VOL 62 NO 3 129
Lee et al. Dorsal hand vein recognition based on 2D gabor filters
3 The original grey-level images of dorsal hand vein captured from different persons by near-infrared charge-coupled
device camera
dorsal hand. Observing the dorsal hand image, the most
distinguishable component in the image is the superficial
vein tree pattern. In our study, the quality of the dorsal
hand vein images does not change significantly in an air-
conditioned or outdoor environment. Also, the colour of
the skin is immaterial: both a light-skinned Caucasian
and a dark-skinned African have vein patterns that
are clearly distinguishable in the images. Some image
samples acquired from our image collection system are
reproduced in Fig. 3.
Preprocessing and extraction of the roi
The features of vein patterns extracted from the same
region in different dorsal hand vein images are
compared for verification. The region to be extracted
is known as the ROI. It is important to fix the ROI in
the same position of different dorsal hand vein images to
ensure the stability of the principal extracted vein
features. The fixing process has significant influence on
the accuracy of verification. The dorsal hand vein image
preprocessing procedure utilised in this study is well
described by our previous work.15 First, a median filter
is employed on the dorsal hand vein images to remove
some noise and an Otsus method23 is applied to select a
suitable threshold to segment the hand region, as shown
in Fig. 4b. Second, the inner border tracing algorithm24
is used to find the contour of the dorsal hand region and
the centre of gravity of the binary image (Fig. 4b) is then
calculated. Then, the distance between centre of gravity
and each point on the dorsal hand contour for both the
first and fourth sub-regions is calculated (Fig. 4c).
Finally, two datum points, P5 and P6 (Fig. 4d), are
selected based on the longest distance obtained from the
first and the fourth sub-regions, respectively and a
square (1286128) ROI is defined, as shown in Fig. 4f.
Under normal conditions, the ROIs should cover almost
the same region in different dorsal hand vein images.
In this way, we can overcome the problem of not using
a docking device while acquiring dorsal hand vein
images. High verification accuracy can simultaneously
be maintained.
130 The Imaging Science Journal 2014 VOL 62 NO
Proposed method for dorsal hand vein
recognition
In this paper, a dorsal hand vein recognition algorithm is
presented, which includes two basic processes: feature
extraction and matching. The motivation for using a 2D
Gabor filter in our dorsal hand vein research is first discussed.
Overview of Gabor functions
Marcelja25 and Daugman16,26 modelled the responses of
the visual cortex by Gabor functions because they are
similar to the receptive field profiles in the mammalian
cortical simple cells. Gabor filters are extremely useful
for texture analysis because of the 2D spectral specificity
of texture as well as its variation with 2D spatial
position. Daugman16,26 developed the 2D Gabor func-
tions (a series of local spatial bandpass filters), which
have good spatial localisation, orientation selectivity
and frequency selectivity. A circular 2D Gabor filter is
an oriented complex sinusoidal grating modulated by a
2D Gaussian function, which is given by
Gs,u,h x,y~gs x,yexp2pjux cos hzy sin h (1)
where
1    
gs x,y~ exp { x2 zy2 =2s2 (2)
2ps2
where j5(21)1/2. The frequency of the span-limited
sinusoidal grating is given by u and its orientation is
specified as h . gs(x,y) is the Gaussian function and s is
the standard deviation of the Gaussian envelope. The
parameters of a 2D Gabor filter are therefore given by
the frequency u, the orientation h and the standard
deviation s. Note that we need only to consider h in the
interval [0u, 180u]. However, most 2D Gabor filters have
a slight response to regions of uniform luminance [or
direct current (DC)]. This DC response is zero for 2D
Gabor filters having pure sine phase and greatest for
filters having pure cosine phase. In order to provide
insensitive to illumination, we removed the DC of 2D
Gabor filter with the application of the following formula
3
 Lee et al. Dorsal hand vein recognition based on 2D gabor filters

4 The results of the dorsal hand vein image preprocessing: a the original dorsal hand vein images; b the st region is
segmented by the Otsus method; c the vein border is extracted by the inner border tracing algorithm; d two datum
points P5 and P6 are selected; e the dorsal hand image is rotated an angle h which is between line P5 P6 and the hori-
zontal line; f a square region is located and denoted as the region of interest

In this work, we proposed to divide the ROI image

Pk Pk
i~{k j~{k Gs,u,h i, j
Zs,u,h x,y~Gs,u,h x,y{
2kz12
where (2kz1)2 is the size of the filter. In this paper,
we express equation (3) in the complex form
Zs,u,h x,y~Rs,u,h x,yzjIs,u,h x,y. The Rs,u,h x,y and
Is,u,h x,y are the real and imaginary parts of the 2D
Gabor filter, respectively.
Such 2D Gabor filters are widely used as tunable
filters for extracting the orientation or edge information
from images. Lee27 gave a good introduction to image
representation by using Gabor functions. Daugman21
applied the 2D Gabor filter for iris recognition
technology, because it can offer good distinguish ability
in both frequency and space domains with very high
speed. In most application, they are bandpass filters,
which are inspired by a multichannel filtering theory for
processing visual information in the early stages of the
human visual system.16 The input image is generally
filtered by a family of 2D Gabor filters tuned to several
resolutions and orientations. However, it may not be
computationally convenient or feasible to apply a large
number of filters responding at multiple resolutions and
orientations to an image.
Adaptive Gabor filter
The 2D Gabor filter-based edge detector, which shows
advantage over Cannys28 edge detector according to the
three detection criterions proposed by Canny, was first
proposed by Mehrotra et al.29 It is shown that when
these design parameters (centre frequency u, filter
orientation h and space envelope s) are suitably chosen,
the 2D Gabor filter-based edge detector yields its best
performance. Because the dorsal hand vein are flow-like
patterns which consist of locally ridge and valley
structures. They have well-defined local frequency and
local orientation. In order to ensure the performance of
an automatic dorsal hand vein identification system to
be robust, we used the Gabor-based approach for
extracting local energy in the dorsal hand vein recogni-
tion. However, accurate recognition only occurs if the
parameters defining the 2D Gabor filters are selected
properly.
into M6M non-overlap blocks, so the adaptive Gabor
(3) filter can be applied independently to each block, as
illustrated in Fig. 5a. In this work, the size of each block
is W6W. If W is small, some smooth area may be
affected by noise and adjusted to complex area. Larger
W may enhance the anti-noise ability of the block.
However, if W is too large, the block cannot reflect the
detailed change of the image. In this work, we set 32632
as the size of the each block and M54. An important
issue in applying adaptive Gabor filter is the selection of
filter parameters h, u and s in each block, respectively.
We discuss the optimisation algorithm that determines
the best parameter values of a single 2D Gabor filter for
dorsal hand vein recognition as follows.
Estimation of orientation field
The orientation image represents an intrinsic property of
the dorsal hand vein images and defines invariant
coordinates for ridges and valleys in a local neighbour-
hood. By viewing a dorsal hand vein image as an
oriented texture, a number of methods have been
proposed to estimate directional fields.3033 The main
methods are techniques based in local gradient to
compute the main direction of the local block,31,33 using
an algorithm to estimate the orientation by a mask with
5 a The dorsal hand vein image was divided into 16
regions and each block is distinguished into three
categories according to the variance change, b stable
area, c slow change area and d fast change area

The Imaging Science Journal 2014 VOL 62 NO 3 131

Lee et al. Dorsal hand vein recognition based on 2D gabor filters
6 Eight mask patterns of the local direction pattern
operator (363 pixels)
969 or 17617 pixels of size30 and using Gabor filter
to obtain ridge directions.33 Lin and Wan32 chose
Sobel operator to calculate the directional image in
the fingerprint image. Although there still are other
techniques,31 they are rarely employed due to the
complicated algorithm.
In most cases, one would used 2D Gabor filters with
eight different orientations h[f0, p=8, 2p=8, . . . , 7p=8g.
In order to determine the optimal orientation parameter
of 2D Gabor filter in each block, we developed a new
model of orientation analysis to find the vein direction at
every block of dorsal hand vein image. To compute the
direction at each block, the direction operators (as
shown in Fig. 6) is designed and represented by eight
local direction patterns (LDPs). The range of displace-
ment is restricted within a local 363 window where
most local orientation can be determined. After each
block is scanned by those eight local 363 mask patterns
individually, then eight feature values can be obtained
by summing up the pixel intensities of corresponding
blocks. Each pixel f(i, j) in the image is considered as the
centre of mask pattern, and the corresponding direction
intensity is represented by Lp, where p51, 2, , 8. Every
feature value is obtained by
X
1 X
1
Lp i, j ~ jf (iza, jzb)Sp (a,b)
a~{1 b~{1
m X
X n
Lp ~ Lp (i, j)
j~1 i~1
where n and m are the width and height of the image
block, f(i, j) is the image pixel value and Sp is one of the
local patterns. We can employ eight LDPs to compute
eight feature values that represent various direction
patterns for each block in the ROI image. Since the
designed LDP features include the information of 2D
distributions, they can represent the image orientation
characteristics more closely. Also, every feature value
is constructed by the LDP operator. Equation (4)
explained that the pixels of each block are convoluted
by eight local 363 mask patterns individually. After the
entire block is slipped by one of the mask patterns, the
original pixel values are changed to the intensity values,
demonstrating the position relationship of each pixel to
its neighbours. Then, all of the intensity values are
added up by equation (5). In each block, the optimal
direction of Gabor filter is chosen by the maximum
value of the direction intensity Lp.
132 The Imaging Science Journal 2014 VOL 62 NO
Estimation of centre frequency
In general, edge of the image has obvious directionality
in each block. There is regularity in the perpendicular
direction of the local edge. In this direction, the change
of pixel grey levels can be seen as a sine wave. So we can
estimate the frequency by calculating the distance T
between two peaks (or troughs) of the sine wave, and the
frequency is u51/T. In figerprint recognition,18 they
employed the reciprocal of the average inter-ridge
distance T for setting the centre frequency. However,
there is no regular texture and frequency characteristic
in dorsal hand vein images. Using the method18 is
difficult and unreasonable. From many experiments, we
found that the Gabor filter is not sensitive to the
frequency. To address this issue, we divide all frequen-
cies into three range groups, and then assign one simple
value to represent each group. The results were not
affected by the simplification. Therefore, we proposed a
novel method to estimate the centre frequency.
There are not regular texture structure and direction
characteristic in dorsal hand vein image, as shown in
Fig. 5. It is difficult to calculate the average inter-ridge
distance T for setting the frequency. Herein, we find that
the texture structure and variance of image are related to
each other. In each block of the ROI, it shows more
complex texture structure and higher variance when T is
small, and it shows a smoother texture structure and
lower variance when T is large. Therefore, we can use
the change of variance to estimate the centre frequency
in each block. In our dorsal hand vein database, we
observe the variance distribution of each block in Fig. 5
where the variance distributed random variable tends
towards the normal distribution. Thus, the statistical
method is employed to find the suitable frequency. In
our experiments, we divided each block of the ROI
image into three categories according to the variance
change: stable area, slow change area and fast change
area (shown in Fig. 5bd), and three simplified values
assigned to each frequency block are 0, 0?09 and 0?25,
respectively. The method to estimate frequency can be
(4) obtained by
8
< 0,
> if VarvH1
:
u~ 0 09, if H1 VarvH2 (6)
>
(5) : :
0 25, otherwise
where the Var is the variance of block, H1 and H2 are
two thresholds of the piecewise function, and they are
Im2Is and ImzIs, respectively. Im is the mean of the
variance distribution, and Is is the standard deviation of
the mean. Using the equation (6) to estimate frequency
can avoid the situation that frequency is hard to
calculate as well as mistake of frequency calculations.
Estimation of standard deviation
The standard deviation of a 2D normal (or Gaussian)
distribution (or envelope) is represented by s. It is
related to the width of the Gaussian that modulates the
Gabor filter. If s is too big, the filter is more robust to
noises, but it does not capture the ridge details. If s is
too small, the filter does not remove noises, but it
captures the ridge details. By comparing the experiment
result, s52621/2 is optimal for our dorsal hand vein
recognition system, as shown in Table 1.
We can determine the optimal parameters of h, u and
s in each block by the methods above. According to
3
 Lee et al. Dorsal hand vein recognition based on 2D gabor filters

of the dorsal hand vein and it closely resembles the

original dorsal hand vein patterns.
Feature matching
In order to describe clearly the matching process, each
feature vector is considered as two 2D feature matrices,
real and imaginary. A normalised Hamming distance21
is adopted to determine the similarity measurement for
VeinCode matching. However, in order to provide slight
translation and rotation invariance matching, the
normalised Hamming distance can be improved as
HDmin ~
P
min(N,Nzs) P
min(N,Nzt)
PR izs, jzt6QR i,jzPI izs, jzt6QI i, j 
i~max(1,1zs) j~max(1,1zt)
min
jsjvS,jtjvT 2H sH t
7 a original ROI image, be the real part feature of the (11)
(11)
dorsal hand vein by 2D Gabor lter with a set of para-
Let P and Q be two dorsal hand vein feature matrices.
meter and f the result of adaptive Gabor lter
The PR(QR) and PI(QI) are the real part and the
imaginary part of P(Q), respectively; the Boolean
these methods, we can get different parameters of the operator denotes exclusive OR, the size of the
adaptive Gabor filter for each block of the ROI image. feature matrices is N6N, the S53 and T53 determine
Given a neighbourhood window of size S6S for the maximum allowable horizontal and vertical transla-
S52kz1, the discrete convolutions of f(x,y) with tion, H(s)5min(N,Nzs)2max(1,1zs) and H(t)5min(N,
respective real part and imaginary part at the sampling Nzt)2max(1,1zt). It is noted that HDmin is between 1
point (x,y) can be defined as follow and 0. The Hamming distance for perfect matching is
X
k X
k zero. Although the ROI has been carefully located
CR x,ys,u,h ~ f xzX ,yzY Rs,u,h X ,Y (7) according to the two points, it still cannot ensure that
X~{k Y~{k the ROI will always be located in the same position in
different dorsal hand vein images. Because of the unstable
X
k X
k preprocessing, the minimum HD value obtained from the
CI x,ys,u,h ~ f xzX ,yzY Is,u,h X ,Y (8) equation (11) can support both approximately transla-
X~{k Y~{k tion and rotation invariant matching.
Gabor-filtered output of an image f(x,y) is obtained by
the convolution of the each block with the adaptive Dorsal hand vein database construction
Gabor filter until the whole ROI image is traversal. An NIR CCD camera was used to acquire dorsal hand
Finally, the sample point in the filtered image is coded to vein images. It possesses the benefits of easy availability,
two bits, called VeinCode (VR,VI), by the following uniform and consistently high image quality, conveni-
inequalities ence and low cost. In this work, the camera that we used
(
1, if CR x,ys,u,h 0 to acquire dorsal hand vein images was a digital noise
VR x,y~ (9) reduction (DNR) DSP camera, as shown in Fig. 2. Each
0, if CR x,ys,u,h v0 image has a resolution of 3206240 in 8-bit grey scales
( per pixel. The reason for using such a low spatial
1, if CI x,ys,u,h 0 resolution is that both the data amount in dorsal hand
VI x,y~ (10) vein images and noise sensitivity can be reduced while
0, if CI x,ys,u,h v0
the features of dorsal hand veins can still be preserved.
Using this coding method, the texture information in This makes sure that there is enough texture information
dorsal hand vein images is stored in the feature vector. for reliable dorsal hand vein recognition. To obtain high
Figure 7be shows the real part feature of the dorsal verification accuracy, it is important to construct an
hand vein by one 2D Gabor filter with a set of objective verification template library. Therefore, we
parameter. Figure 7f shows the real part feature of the collect a large number of dorsal hand vein images using
same dorsal hand vein by our proposed method. From a homemade digital optical sensor to form a database.
Fig. 7f, the image depicts the strongest texture structure The database includes 6160 dorsal hand vein images
from 308 different volunteers (hence 308 different
Table 1 The relationship between the recognition classes) with 20 images captured from each class. The
accuracy and the different standard deviations at images are acquired during different stages and the time
the three condence intervals interval between two collections is at least 1 month,
Confidence intervals (%)
which provides a challenge to our algorithm. Ten dorsal
hand vein images were acquired each time for each
Standard deviation (s) 68 95 99 person. The database constructed in this way includes
possible variations of dorsal hand vein images under
1 97.82% 96.82% 95.45% various conditions. It includes several racial groups,
21/2 98.67% 97.84% 96.82% including Chinese, African and Caucasian. The age
2621/2 99.27% 98.12% 97.27% range of the volunteers was between 18 and 60 years,
4621/2 98.35% 97.37% 96.44%
and their occupations ranged from university students,

The Imaging Science Journal 2014 VOL 62 NO 3 133

Lee et al. Dorsal hand vein recognition based on 2D gabor filters
professors and technicians to manual workers such as
cleaners and electricians. No distinction was made
between male and female when the samples were
collected.
Our dorsal hand vein database includes two main
parts. One is our earlier image set15 containing 4280
images from 214 different volunteers. Each individual
provides 20 images. In the first stage, ten images of each
dorsal hand are acquired. Four weeks later, ten more
images of each dorsal hand are taken. The other part
contains 1880 images from 94 volunteers which are
captured in two different stages. The total number of
dorsal hand vein classes is thus 308 (214z94). For each
dorsal hand vein class, we choose eight samples from
images taken in the first stage for training and all
samples captured at other stages serve as test samples.
This is consistent with the widely accepted standard for
biometrics algorithm testing34 (training images and
testing images should be respectively captured at
different stages). To satisfy this requirement, 616 images
taken in the first stage are not used in the experiments.
Therefore, for our dorsal hand vein database, there are
2464 images for training and 3080 images for testing.
So far, only small datasets have been used to evaluate
recognition performance for dorsal hand vein recogni-
tion by most methods. To demonstrate the robustness of
the proposed approach, in our experiments, we con-
struct the large database involving more than 300
subjects. In the future, we hope to make the large
database available for free download for biometric
researcher.
Experimental results
To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method for
dorsal hand vein recognition, the experiments were
conducted in two modes: identification and verification.
In the identification mode, for example, if the test
sample and the found template are from the same class,
this is a correct recognition. Therefore, in identification
mode, the algorithm can be measured by correct
recognition rate (CRR), the ratio of the number of
samples being correctly classified to the total number of
test samples. In the verification mode, the well-known
statistical pair, the FRR and the FAR, is usually
adapted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed
method for dorsal hand vein recognition. Then, the
receiver operating characteristic curves is normally used
to measure the accuracy of the matching process,
which is a plot of genuine acceptance rate against
false acceptance rate for all possible operating points.
The following experiment results will demonstrate the
eminent performance of the proposed method. The
experiments conducted below were run on a 3?2-GHz
PC with 2-GB RAM using Matlab 7?0.
In our works, we proposed to divide the ROI image
into M6M non-overlap blocks, and then the adaptive
Gabor filter is applied independently to each block. The
parameter W is the size of the block, and too large or too
small will affect the identification results. Therefore, we
divided the each ROI image into different non-overlap
block sizes (16616, 32632 and 64664) and the images
at different sizes are tested. According to Table 2, CRRs
of the 32632 sizes are higher than those of other sizes.
In other words, the dorsal hand vein image with block
size W532 is more suitable for feature extraction than
134 The Imaging Science Journal 2014 VOL 62 NO
the other sizes. It is evident that the size of blocks can
play an important role. Therefore, the block with bigger
or smaller size is not suitable for the method proposed in
this paper, and they cannot offer higher recognition rate.
The relationship between the verification result and the
different number of training samples is also shown in
Table 2. The capability to achieve higher performance
with smaller number of training samples or registration
samples is highly desirable in any biometrics system.
Therefore, in Table 2, we also present analysis of
various block sizes when the numbers of training
samples are varied. It reveals that as the number of
training samples per class is increased, the relative gain
among different block sizes becomes more apparent.
Performance evaluation of the proposed method
In Section 4?2, we estimate the suitable centre frequency
based on the variance distribution of each block.
Because the variance distributed random variable tends
towards the normal distribution, the three-sigma rule is
employed to estimate the optimised centre frequency. If
a data distribution is approximately normal then about
68% of the values are within one standard deviation of
the mean, about 95% of the values are within two
standard deviations and about 99?7% lie within three
standard deviations. In our method, eight images of
each class at the first stage are selected randomly to
constitute the training set, and all sample images of each
class at the second stage are treated as the test set.
Therefore, there are 39 424 (2464616) blocks with 2464
training images from our dorsal hand vein database to
estimate the best centre frequency. The variances of the
total blocks are estimated at three confidence intervals.
Thus, it is important to estimate lower and upper
confidence limits which the actual range of variance R is
expected to fall into. The confidence limits at different
confidence intervals are defined as
Im {lIs RIm zlIs , l~1, 2, 3 (12)
where Im is the mean of the total variances, Is is its
standard deviation and l is the number of standard
deviation. The Im2lIs and ImzlIs are two thresholds of
the piecewise function (as described in Section 4?2) at
three different confidence intervals.
To investigate the relationship between the recogni-
tion accuracy and the different standard deviation s,
each ROI image is used by different standard deviations
(1, 21/2, 2621/2 and 4621/2) and tested by the three
confidence intervals. Experimental results show that the
standard deviation s52621/2 is the best choice to
achieve the task of dorsal hand vein recognition at the
68% confidence intervals, as shown in Table 1. It is clear
Table 2 The testing results of the different block sizes
with different training samples
Block size
Training samples 16616 32632 64664
2 92.53% 93.38% 93.56%
4 95.08% 96.44% 95.87%
6 97.07% 98.37% 98.18%
8 98.51% 99.27% 98.94%
Note: Percentage values show recognition rate.
3
 Lee et al. Dorsal hand vein recognition based on 2D gabor filters

8 Original image from the same hand capturing in different sessions and their features generated by different Gabor l-
ters: a and e original images; b and f region of interests images; c and g imaginary part of features from adaptive
Gabor lter; d and h imaginary part of features from optimal single Gabor lter, respectively

that the adaptive Gabor filter is not sensitive to the
standard deviation, but is slightly sensitive to the centre
frequency. By the proposed method, the adaptive
selection of Gabor filter parameters h, u and s in each
block can achieve a correct recognition rate up to
99?27% for dorsal hand vein recognition.
Comparison and discussion
The adaptive Gabor filter defined in Section 4?2 is
thought to be highly suitable for dorsal hand vein
recognition since it is constructed based on the observa-
tions about the characteristics of the dorsal hand vein.
This is confirmed by our experimental results shown in
Fig. 8. We determine the best parameter values of
adaptive Gabor filter and compare the two images
(Fig. 8a and e) from the same hand capturing in
different stages. Figure 8c and g shows the imaginary
part of features from adaptive Gabor filter. It can be
noticed that the true vein structures are quite well
preserved in the resulting binarised image. Figure 8d
and h also shows the imaginary part of features from
optimal single Gabor filter. Both of them have similar
features, but cannot describe the dorsal hand vein
texture feature completely.
In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed
method, we compared our method with traditional
Gabor filter: optimal single Gabor filter18 and multiple
Gabor filters.19 Figure 9ac illustrates the FAR and
FRR distributions at different Gabor filter methods. It
can be seen from those figures that there exist two curves
in the distributions at different methods. One curve
corresponds to genuine matching and the other corre-
sponds to impostor matching. When the decision
threshold is set as the one corresponding to the
intersection of genuine and impostor distribution curves,
the total error reaches the minimum, and the corre-
sponding threshold. According to Fig. 9, equal error
rates of our method and multiple Gabor filters method
are much less than the single Gabor filter method.
Although the performance of our method is similar to
the multiple Gabor filters approach, the computational
cost of our method can be greatly reduced. In other
words, we can employ the adaptive Gabor filter to
replace the multiple Gabor filters for dorsal hand vein
recognition.
In addition to validating the accuracy of the proposed
method, there is also a need to evaluate the speed of the
system. The feature extraction times for single Gabor
filter, multiple Gabor filters and adaptive Gabor filter
are 37, 787 and 212 ms, respectively. Although our
proposed method takes more time than the method of
the single Gabor filter, it accomplished the lower
computational costs than the method of multiple
Gabor filters for feature extraction. That is because the

9 False acceptance rate and false rejection rate distributions at different Gabor lter methods: a single Gabor lter; b
adaptive Gabor lter; c multiple Gabor lters

The Imaging Science Journal 2014 VOL 62 NO 3 135

Lee et al. Dorsal hand vein recognition based on 2D gabor filters
10 The receiver operating characteristic curves achieved
by different methods
adaptive Gabor filter must calculate local orientation
and frequency at every block. Table 3 shows the wall
time for different stages of the proposed method and the
total time. The whole process should take only about
1 s, which is fast enough for real-time verification. In
fact, we have not yet optimised the program code, so it is
possible that the computation time could be reduced.
Among existing methods for dorsal hand vein
recognition, those proposed by Lin and Fan,8 Wang
et al.11 and Crisan et al.,14 respectively, are the best
known. Moreover, they characterise local details of the
dorsal hand vein from different viewpoints, i.e. appear-
ance-based approach, the geometric-based approach
and multiresolution representation method. Here, we
also used the patch-based approach35 to extract the vein
feature for dorsal hand vein recognition. To further
prove the effectiveness of the proposed method, we
make detailed comparison between the proposed
method and the above four methods (and our previous
work15) on our own dorsal hand vein database. We
compare our experimental results of each algorithm with
its published results and find that they are consistent.
This verifies to a large extent the correctness of our
implementations of other methods. Table 4 and Fig. 10
detail the experimental results.
Table 4 illustrates that the CRR of each algorithm is
greater than 90%. This implies the high accuracy of these
methods. Figure 10 illustrates the receiver operating
characteristic curves on our dorsal hand vein database
for the seven algorithms compared, namely, multiple
multiresolution filters, laplacianpalm, minutiae feature
points, eigenvein, local edge pattern and the proposed
method. To better distinguish these well-performing
methods, the horizontal axis of Fig. 10 is spread out
using the logarithmic scale. From the results shown in
Table 4 and Fig. 10, we can find that proposed method
has the better performance, followed by the previous
work,15 and the methods described by Wang et al.,11 by
Table 3 The wall time for different stages
proposed method
Preprocessing Feature extraction Matching
(s) (s) (s)
0.54 0.21 0.03
136 The Imaging Science Journal 2014 VOL 62 NO
Lin and Fan,8 by Lee et al.35 and by Crisan et al.,14
respectively.
The experimental results demonstrate that our current
method is better than the geometric-based, appearance-
based, patch-based and multiresolution representation
methods, respectively. Generally, the geometric-based
approach14 extracts local features such as the locations
and local statistics of the principal veins, minutiae points
and ridge bifurcations. However, geometric features are
difficult to be extracted, represented and compared while
the discriminability of geometric features such as texture
energy is not strong enough for dorsal hand vein
recognition. The Gabor-based method can effectively
analyse local variations of the intensity signals, which
can reflect most of the random shape information of the
palm vein and thus achieves much higher performance.
The methods of our previous work15 and Wang et al.11
employed the appearance-based method to represent
dorsal hand vein, such as eigenvein (where features are
extracted by the two-directional two-dimensional prin-
cipal component analysis), and laplacianpalm (where
features are extracted by the locality preserving projec-
tion). While the eigenvein method aims to preserve the
global structure of the image space, and the laplacian-
palm method aims to preserve the local structure of the
image space, our proposed method aims to preserve the
global and local structure of the image space. That is,
their methods did not effectively exploit global and local
features of the dorsal hand vein which play an important
role in recognition. In addition, the observed perfor-
mance from the laplacianpalm method was not high
performance on our dorsal hand vein database, and this
may due to the fact that it does not focus on extracting
and matching the local textured information, and lack
strong mechanism to accommodate potentially large
variations which are more likely to exist in the non-
contact database. Unlike the two appearance-based
methods, the proposed method combines the global
and local structures of the image space to extract
the dorsal hand vein features and is thus expected to
achieve better results. The multiresolution representa-
tion approach detailed in Ref. 8 is fully automated and
uses the combination of multiresolution representations
from the post-processed thermal vein patterns. However,
the multiresolution representation approach does not
outperform the proposed method. Due to the fact that
when the dorsal hand veins in the image are not very clear,
it is difficult to extract local features with the multi-
resolution representation. The patch-based approach35
extracts dorsal hand vein features by analysing the
texture features of the local image in different orienta-
tions, and also achieves reasonably superior perfor-
mance. However, the patch-based approach emphasised
the orientation information of image, and the frequency
Table 4 Performance comparison of several well-known
methods on our dorsal hand vein database
Methods Correct recognition rate Equal error rate
of the
Lin and Fan 8
97.39% 1.74%
Crisan et al.14 96.28% 2.91%
Total Lee et al.35 98.95% 0.77%
(s) Wang et al.11 98.47% 1.31%
Hsu et al.15 98.83% 0.82%
0.78 Proposed 99.27% 0.51%
3

information of image is not considered. From Table 4
and Fig. 10, we can see that the proposed method
obtains better results than other methods. It is because
our method well characterises random shape features of
the dorsal hand vein and can set the Gabor filter
parameters automatically. The real and imaginary parts
of Gabor features used in proposed method is in
essence global shape features of the dorsal hand vein.
The proposed dorsal hand vein representation also
reflects local shape information of the dorsal hand vein
by analysing local variations of the intensity signals.
This makes our method slightly better than others.
Failure verifications occur in some dorsal hand vein
images. They can be categorised into three main groups
by carefully observing these failure dorsal hand vein
images.
1. In the preprocessing, we employed two datum points
to find the ROI automatically. Although the dorsal
hand vein images are almost located at the same
region, there is still a few unstable preprocessing,
such as translation or rotation. These translations
and rotations result from both the misplacement of
hands during dorsal hand vein acquisition and the
imperfect preprocessing. The matching algorithm
given in equation (11) increases the resistance of the
developed algorithm against rotation and transla-
tion and therefore results in a more robust
algorithm. It is worth noting that the proposed
algorithm is still sensitive to big amount of rotations
and translations.
2. The thickness of the vein will be affected due to the
seasonal change, and some principal vein features
may be lost inside the ROI region as a result.
Moreover, the boundary of the regions could form
pseudo principal vein features. These issues might
lead to match difficulties, but only in rare and
extreme cases.
3. Sometimes the dorsal hand images were captured by
the image collection device which will result in some
noise images (such as moles, scars, pigmentation and
hair). Too few principal vein features were extracted
for verification which resulted in verification failure
as well.
The conditions 13 mentioned above cannot be avoided
and are difficult to distinguish the dorsal hand vein
images by applying our approach. This problem can be
alleviated by utilising other methods to extract vein
features, or combining with other biometric verification
methods.
Conclusions
We have developed a reliable and robust dorsal hand
vein identification system for real-time personal identi-
fication by applying a low-cost NIR CCD camera-based
dorsal hand vein device to capture the dorsal hand vein
images. A preprocessing algorithm extracts a square
area from a dorsal hand vein image for feature
extraction. To represent a low-resolution dorsal hand
vein image and to match different dorsal hand vein
images, we proposed the adaptive Gabor filter method.
It involves the parameter selection of suitable orienta-
tions and frequencies, extracting the dorsal hand vein
patterns, and applying the normalised Hamming dis-
tance for the matching measurement. This method
represents the biometric features in bit string format
Lee et al. Dorsal hand vein recognition based on 2D gabor filters
which enable speedy matching and convenient storage.
Compared to the traditional Gabor filters and existing
algorithms, the method of AGF can achieve encoura-
ging performance in dorsal hand vein recognition.
In summary, we conclude that our dorsal hand vein
identification system can achieve good performance in
terms of speed and accuracy. For further improvement
of the system, we will focus on three issues: (1) to reduce
the size of the device for practical applications, (2) to
design a hand attachment frame for constraining the
participants hand for stable preprocessing and (3) to
combine the proposed dorsal hand vein coding scheme
with other texture feature measurements such as texture
energy for coarse level classification to achieve higher
performance.
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