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With recent advancements in deep learning, spoofing techniques have developed and generative adversarial networks (GANs) have become an emerging threat to finger-vein recognition systems. Therefore, previous research has been performed to generate finger-vein images for training spoof detectors. However, these are limited and researchers still cannot generate elaborate fake finger-vein images. Therefore, we develop a new densely updated contrastive learning-based self-attention generative adversarial network (DCS-GAN) to create elaborate fake finger-vein images, enabling the training of corresponding spoof detectors. Additionally, we propose an enhanced convolutional network for a next-dimension (ConvNeXt)-Small model with a large kernel attention module as a new spoof detector capable of distinguishing the generated fake finger-vein images. To improve the spoof detection performance of the proposed method, we introduce fractal dimension estimation to analyze the complexity and irregularity of class activation maps from real and fake finger-vein images, enabling the generation of more realistic and sophisticated fake finger-vein images. Experimental results obtained using two open databases showed that the fake images by the DCS-GAN exhibited Frechet inception distances (FID) of 7.601 and 23.351, with Wasserstein distances (WD) of 18.158 and 10.123, respectively, confirming the possibility of spoof attacks when using existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) frameworks of spoof detection. Furthermore, experiments conducted with the proposed spoof detector yielded average classification error rates of 0.4% and 0.12% on the two aforementioned open databases, respectively, outperforming existing SOTA methods for spoof detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As global average fertility rates decline annually, a crisis brought by declining birthrates gradually emerges, further impacting the existing education system. In response to the impact of declining birthrates on education, countries have recently accelerated the development of distance learning. Distance learning provides guaranteed access to comprehensive and quality education while encouraging continuous learning opportunities for everyone. However, the identity recognition technology used in the current distance learning platform seldom addresses the problem of inconsistent image quality in actual scenarios, making it difficult to ensure the practical application of the model. To solve these issues, we propose a lightweight dual-attention convolutional neural network (LDA-FV) constructed through a dual attention-based inverted residual block (DA-IRB) and implemented using an adaptive margin loss (AML) function for finger-vein recognition. This method not only extracts effective finger-vein features through DA-IRB but also adjusts the training difficulty in accordance with the image quality. Furthermore, owing to its lightweight design, the model can be more flexibly deployed on existing hardware devices (e.g., mouse) in distance education scenarios. The experimental results of this study indicate that the proposed method effectively enhanced the model’s recognition capability using the finger-vein database of the University Sains Malaysia (FVUSM) and the PLUSVein dorsal-palmar finger-vein (PLUSVein-FV3) public database, achieving correct identification rates (CIRs) of 99.90% and 97.50%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Finger-vein recognition is a biometric technology, which makes use of the pattern of veins in the skin of fingers. Finger-vein recognition is widely employed owing to its high recognition rate and ease of use. A spoof detection method is essential for identifying spoof attacks in biometric-recognition systems. Studies have primarily investigated methods for detecting spoof attacks that utilize image printing or replay using fake finger-vein images. However, no studies have investigated the detection of spoof attacks based on fake finger-vein images generated through a generative adversarial network (GAN), which is commonly implemented in deep-learning technologies. To solve this problem, we newly propose a spoof attack detection method robust against GAN-based fake finger-vein image generation. We verified the use of spoof finger-vein images generated through cycle-consistent adversarial networks (CycleGAN) to attack conventional finger-vein recognition systems and used this finding as the motivation for our research. We also propose a finger-vein spoof-detection method that employs score fusion of ensemble networks based on support vector machine using adaptive moment estimation (Adam) with a sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) optimizer. We conducted experiments using two open databases, ISPR and Idiap, to evaluate the proposed framework. The average classification error rates (ACER) of spoof detection using the proposed method with ISPR and Idiap were 0.37% and 0.23%, respectively. This result confirms the better performance by our method than conventional state-of-the-art methods.

Finger-vein has been used for automatic personal recognition systems for over a decade. Its size and characteristics against presentation attacks make it suitable for various commercial and governmental applications. As with other biometric traits, the majority of finger-vein recognition methods employ hand-crafted feature for image classification. Lately, there are some convolutional neural network (CNN) models are designed for finger-vein identification and verification. Whereas, the CNN-based approaches tend to set up increasing layers and more parameters, which incur equipment memory issue and algorithm execution speed issue. Besides, many researchers have made great efforts to enhance hand-crafted feature-based method by using image enhancement algorithms. Hence, it is significant to explore high-performance finger-vein recognition without image enhancement in deep learning world. In this work, two different dimension issues are investigated: lightweight CNN model, the effect of image enhancement on finger-vein biometrics in deep feature space. Transfer learning plays an important role in extracting informative and representative features by information transfer from the pre-trained network to a novice via fine-tuning. The experimental results on four benchmark databases HKPU, FV-USM, SDUMLA and UTFVP demonstrate the proposed lightweight model 'LightFVN' outperforms the existing published competition winners. Furthermore, image enhancement turns out not to be essential for CNN-based finger-vein biometrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Finger-vein biometrics has been extensively investigated for personal verification. Single sample per person (SSPP) finger-vein recognition is one of the open issues in finger-vein recognition. Despite recent advances in deep neural networks for finger-vein recognition, current approaches depend on a large number of training data. However, they lack the robustness of extracting robust and discriminative finger-vein features from a single training image sample. A deep ensemble learning method is proposed to solve the SSPP finger-vein recognition in this article. In the proposed method, multiple feature maps were generated from an input finger-vein image, based on various independent deep learning-based classifiers. A shared learning scheme is investigated among classifiers to improve their feature representation captivity. The learning speed of weak classifiers is also adjusted to achieve the simultaneously best performance. A deep learning model is proposed by an ensemble of all these adjusted classifiers. The proposed method is tested with two public finger vein databases. The result shows that the proposed approach has a distinct advantage over all the other tested popular solutions for the SSPP problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At present, ResNet and DenseNet have achieved significant performance gains in the field of finger-vein biometric recognition, which is partially attributed to the dominant design of cross-layer skip connection. In this manner, features from multiple layers can be effectively aggregated to provide sufficient discriminant representation. Nevertheless, an over-dense connection pattern may induce channel expansion of feature maps and excessive memory consumption. To address these issues, we proposed a low memory overhead and fairly lightweight network architecture for finger-vein recognition. The core components of the proposed network are a sequence of sparsified densely connected blocks with symmetric structure. In each block, a novel connection cropping strategy is adopted to balance the channel ratio of input/output feature maps. Beyond this, to facilitate smaller model volume and faster convergence, we substitute the standard convolutional kernels with separable convolutional kernels and introduce a robust loss metric that is defined on the geodesic distance of angular space. Our proposed sparsified densely connected network with separable convolution (hereinafter dubbed 'SC-SDCN') has been tested on two benchmark finger-vein datasets, including the Multimedia Lab of Chonbuk National University (MMCBNU)and Finger Vein of Universiti Sains Malaysia (FV-USM), and the advantages of our SC-SDCN can be evident from the experimental results. Specifically, an equal error rate (EER) of 0.01% and an accuracy of 99.98% are obtained on the MMCBNU dataset, and an EER of 0.45% and an accuracy of 99.74% are obtained on the FV-USM dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Finger-vein recognition is a biometric technology, which makes use of the pattern of veins in the skin of fingers. Finger-vein recognition is widely employed owing to its high recognition rate and ease of use. A spoof detection method is essential for identifying spoof attacks in biometric-recognition systems. Studies have primarily investigated methods for detecting spoof attacks that utilize image printing or replay using fake finger-vein images. However, no studies have investigated the detection of spoof attacks based on fake finger-vein images generated through a generative adversarial network (GAN), which is commonly implemented in deep-learning technologies. To solve this problem, we newly propose a spoof attack detection method robust against GAN-based fake finger-vein image generation. We verified the use of spoof finger-vein images generated through cycle-consistent adversarial networks (CycleGAN) to attack conventional finger-vein recognition systems and used this finding as the motivation for our research. We also propose a finger-vein spoof-detection method that employs score fusion of ensemble networks based on support vector machine using adaptive moment estimation (Adam) with a sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) optimizer. We conducted experiments using two open databases, ISPR and Idiap, to evaluate the proposed framework. The average classification error rates (ACER) of spoof detection using the proposed method with ISPR and Idiap were 0.37% and 0.23%, respectively. This result confirms the better performance by our method than conventional state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biometrics is a method of recognizing a person based on one or more unique physical and behavioral characteristics. Since each person has a different structure and shape, it is highly secure and more convenient than the existing security system. Among various biometric authentication methods, finger-vein recognition has advantages in that it is difficult to forge because a finger-vein exists inside one's finger and high user convenience because it uses a non-invasive device. However, motion and optical blur may occur for some reasons such as finger movement and camera defocusing during finger-vein recognition, and such blurring occurrences may increase finger-vein recognition error. However, there has been no research on finger-vein recognition considering both motion and optical blur. Therefore, in this study, we propose a new method for increasing finger-vein recognition accuracy based on a network for the restoration of motion and optical blurring in a finger-vein image (RMOBF-Net). Our proposed network continuously maintains features that can be utilized during motion and optical blur restoration by actively using residual blocks and feature concatenation. Also, the architecture RMOBF-Net is optimized to the finger-vein image domain. Experimental results are based on two open datasets, the Shandong University homologous multi-modal traits finger-vein database and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University finger-image database version 1, from which equal error rates of finger-vein recognition accuracy of 4.290–5.779% and 2.465–6.663% were obtained, respectively. Higher performance was obtained from the proposed method compared with that of state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a system based on image descriptor and Local Histogram Concatenation (LHC) for finger vein recognition is introduced. The LHC of image descriptors such as LBP, LDP CLBP cannot be inverted back to the original images, therefore they can provide good security if stored as enrolled data. On the other hand, the technique of LHC does not depict spatial information, therefore it is expected to be less sensitive to image misalignment if a measure such as the histogram difference (d X 2) is used for recognition. The use of histogram difference makes the system more robust to misalignment compared to the pixel-by-pixel-based measures such as the Hamming Distance (HD). The approach of LHC is implemented by dividing the image descriptor into non-overlapped grids, then the histogram within each grid is calculated and concatenated with the histograms of the preceding grids and finally, the concatenated histograms of each two images are compared using d X 2 measure. Two datasets, UTFVP and SDUMLA-HMT, are used for testing the performance of the system. The results have shown that the Identification Recognition Rate (IRR) is improved when LHCs of the image descriptors with (d X 2) measure are used compared to the use of only the image descriptors with HD measure. For UTFVP dataset, the IRR values were 97.44%, 95% and 98.37% when LHC and (d X 2) were used with LBP, LDP and CLBP, respectively, while these values were 89.44%, 92.63% and 92.92% when only LBP, LDP and CLBP with HD were used. For SDUMLA-HMT dataset, the IRR values of the system were 98.43%, 98.69% and 98.85% when LHC and (d X 2) were used with LBP, LDP and CLBP, respectively, while these values were 97.6%, 98.24% and 97.27% when only the image descriptors LBP, LDP and CLBP with HD were used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Finger-vein recognition is a new type of biometric identification technology compared to traditional biometric identification methods such as fingerprint recognition. Finger-vein is considered a safe and reliable biometric pattern due to its vivo nature and has been widely used in various fields. However, finger-vein images are susceptible to finger thickness and near-infrared light distribution during the process of acquisition, which often results in low-quality images (e.g., low contrast and overexposure), causing feature loss and affecting the final recognition accuracy. In this paper, a method based on double-weighted group sparse representation classification is proposed to improve the recognition performance for low-quality finger-vein images. The proposed method represents the test sample by a sparse linear combination of the training samples while making full use of those training samples' data and label information through the group sparsity constraint. In addition, considering the large intra-class differences and small inter-class differences in low-quality finger-vein images, weight constraints for sparse coefficient vectors are added at the individual and group levels to reduce the impact of low-similarity training samples and heterogeneous training samples on the final recognition results, respectively. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods on three public datasets, experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves better recognition accuracy and robustness, especially for low-quality finger-vein images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to its high anti-counterfeiting and universality, the use of finger-vein pattern for identity authentication has recently attracted extensive attention in academia and industry. Despite recent advances in finger-vein recognition, most of the hand-crafted descriptors require strong prior knowledge, which may be ineffective in expressing its distinctiveness. In this paper, we present a novel compact multi-representation feature descriptor (CMrFD) with visual and semantic consistency, for finger-vein feature representation. Given the finger-vein images, we first form two-view representations to describe the informative vein features in local patches. Then, we jointly learn a feature transformation to map the two-view representations into discriminative binary codes. For the projection function, we linearly combine multi-view information and minimize the quantization error between the projected binary features and the original real-valued features. In terms of visual consistency, we minimize the Euclidean distance of each representation from the same class, at the same time, maximize the Euclidean distance from different classes in the projected space. Semantic consistency is used to ensure that similar images have compact multi-representation combined projection features. Lastly, we calculate the block-wise histograms as the final extracted features for finger-vein recognition. Experimental results on four widely used finger-vein databases demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art finger-vein recognition methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the growing demand for information security, finger-vein recognition has become widespread. However, the robustness of the recognition process becomes a major problem. When identifying unseen categories with traditional finger-vein recognition systems, a few issues remain, such as recognition interference and low efficiency. This paper proposes a Deep Generalized Label Finger-Vein (DGLFV) model to extract feature maps and achieve high-accuracy recognition. The largest rectangular finger-vein region is extracted through image semantic segmentation and the advanced bidirectional traversing and center diffusion method for the known categories. Then we generalize all the unseen categories actively as Class $C+1$ to reduce interference from unregistered users. Furthermore, an adaptive threshold acquisition algorithm is proposed for Label Receiver Operating Characteristic (LROC), so that the procedures of classification, recognition, and verification are unified. Apart from Shandong University Homologous Multi-modal Traits (SDUMLA-HMT), we have conducted additional experiments on our self-built database, Finger Veins of Signal and Information Processing Laboratory (FV-SIPL). The recognition accuracy of the approach proposed in this paper has reached 99.25% and 99.08% testing on FV-SIPL and SDUMLA-HMT, with a low error rate at 1.481% and 2.228% and little time consumption of 0.157s for a single image, which is better than most state-of-the-art finger-vein recognition methods.

The recognition performance deteriorates if degradation factors including blur, noise, and non-uniform illumination exist in the image when acquiring a finger-vein image. Especially, multiple degradation factors can occur when acquiring the finger-vein image, and they require the image restoration. However, previous flow-based model produced lower image quality than the other restoration models, and diffusion-based model had the disadvantage of slow inference speed. Therefore, this study suggests a deep learning-based generative adversarial network for multi-degraded finger-vein image restoration by non-uniform illumination and noise (MFNN-GAN). It considers multiple degradation factors such as non-uniform illumination and noise. Unlike the existing finger-vein image restoration model, MFNN-GAN is capable of adaptive restoration to multiple degradations. Therefore, even if the illumination by near-infrared (NIR) illuminator of finger-vein recognition device is weak or non-uniform, or the consequent captured image is noisy, good recognition performance can be achieved only by our method without replacing the illuminator or camera sensor. The experimental results obtained using finger-vein open datasets, session 1 images from database version 1 of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University finger-image (HKPU-DB) and finger-vein database of SDUMLA-HMT (SDUMLA-HMT-DB)-based degraded databases. The experimental results show that we obtained the lower equal error rate (EER) of finger-vein recognition using MFNN-GAN compared to other state-of-the-art algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biometrics using finger-veins is a recognition method based on the shape of veins in fingers, and it has the advantage of difficulty to be forged. However, a shade is inevitably produced due to the bones and fingernails, and a change in illumination occurs when acquiring the images of finger-veins. Previous studies have conducted finger-vein recognition using a single-type texture image or finger-vein segmented image (shape image). A texture image provides numerous features, but it is vulnerable to the changes in illumination during recognition and contains noises in regions other than the finger-vein region. A shape image is less affected by noises; however, the recognition accuracy is significantly reduced due to fewer features available and mis-segmented regions caused by shades. In this study, therefore, rough finger-vein regions in an image are detected to reduce the effect of mis-segmented regions, to complement the drawbacks of shape image-based finger-vein recognition. Furthermore, score-level fusion is performed for two output scores of deep convolutional neural network extracted from the texture and shape images, which can reduce the sensitivity to noise, while diverse features provided in the texture image are used efficiently. Two open databases, the Shandong University homologous multi-modal traits finger-vein database and Hong Kong Polytech University finger image database, are used for experiments, and the proposed method shows better recognition performance than the state-of-the-art method.

Finger-vein recognition technology has attracted more and more attention because of its high security and convenience. However, the finger-vein image capturing is affected by various factors, which results that some vein patterns are missed in acquired image. Matching minutiae features in such images ultimately degrades verification performance of the finger-vein recognition system. To overcome this problem, in this paper, a novel finger-vein image restoration approach is proposed to recover the missed patterns based on generative adversarial network (GAN), as the first attempt in this area. Firstly, we employ the segmentation algorithm to extract finger-vein network, which is further subject to thinning operation. Secondly, the resulting thinning image is taken as an input of a GAN model to restore the missed vein patterns. Thirdly, the minutiae points are extracted from restoration finger-vein pattern. Finally, we propose a matching approach for verification. Experimental results show that the proposed method can restore the missed vein pattern and reduce the equal error rate (EER) of the finger-vein verification system.

Among the existing biometrics methods, finger-vein recognition is beneficial because finger-veins patterns are locate under the skin and thus difficult to forge. Moreover, user convenience is high because non-invasive image capturing devices are used for recognition. In real environments, however, optical blur can occur while capturing finger-vein images du to both skin scattering blur caused by light scattering in the skin layer and lens focus mismatch caused by finger movement. The blurred images generated in this manner can cause severe performance degradation for finger-vein recognition. The majority of the previous studies addressed the restoration method o skin scattering blurred images; however, only limited studies have addressed the restoration of optically blurred images. Even the previous studies on the restoration of optical blur restoration have performed restoration based on the estimation of the accurate point spread function (PSF) for a specific image-capturing device. Thus, it is difficult to apply these methods to finger-vein images acquired by different devices. To address this problem, this paperproposes a new method for restoring optically blurred finger-vei images using a modified conditional generative adversarial network (conditional GAN) and recognizing the restored finger-vein images using a deep convolutional neural network (CNN). The results of the experiment performed using two open databases, the Shandong University homologous multimodal traits (SDUMLA-HMT) finger-vein database and Hong Kong Polytechnic University finger-image database (version 1) confirmed that the proposed method outperforms the existing methods.

As an important method of biometric authentication, finger-vein recognition utilizes the unique finger-vein patterns to identify individuals at a high level of accuracy and safety. However, noise components, inherent in finger-vein images, pose a formidable challenge for extracting reliable finger-vein features for recognition. To tackle this challenge, intensive efforts have been directed at sparse representation (SR) methods, which can find the best representative of a test sample by a sparse linear combination of training samples (atoms) from a dictionary. Previous SR approaches treat training atoms equally for image representations, even if these atoms may vary in their effectiveness as feature descriptors, thus jeopardizing the denoising and recognition performances. To overcome this limitation, the present study proposed an adaptive SR with distance-based dictionary learning (DDL), enabling the ability to target more informative training samples. Specifically, based on the Euclidean distance, atoms in the dictionary are classified into two groups: the high-information and the low-information. Their weights for feature representations are assigned based on the distance entropy. Experimental results indicate that the developed SR-DDL denoising method, can suppress image noises and subsequently enhance the image recognition performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Finger-vein recognition has the advantages of high immutability, as finger veins are located under the skin, high user convenience, as a non-invasive and contactless capture device, is used, and high readability even when one of the fingers is damaged or not available for recognition. However, there is an issue of recognition performance degradation caused by finger positional variation, misalignment, and shading from uneven illumination. The existing hand-crafted feature-based methods have exhibited varied performance depending on how these issues were handled by pre-processing. To overcome this shortcoming of hand-crafted feature-based methods, convolutional neural network (CNN)-based recognition methods have been researched. The existing systems based on a CNN use two methods: using a difference image as the input to the network and calculating the distance between feature vectors extracted from the CNN. Difference images can be susceptible to noise as they are generated by differences in pixel values. Also, the method for calculating the distance between feature vectors cannot employ all layers of the trained network and has less accuracy than the method employing difference images. To address these issues, this paper examined a method less susceptible to noise and which uses the entire network; a composite image of two finger-vein images was used as the input to a deep, densely-connected convolutional network (DenseNet). Two open databases, namely Shandong University homologous multi-modal traits (SDUMLA-HMT) finger-vein database and The Hong Kong Polytechnic University finger image database (version 1), were used for experiments and the results show that the proposed method has greater performance than the existing methods.

Despite claims that finger-vein biometrics can detect aliveness, recent research has shown that current systems can be fooled by forged vein patterns printed on a distinctive paper, raising considerable security concerns regarding the identification authenticity of these systems. Additionally, finger-vein identification exhibits low accuracy rates in real-world applications due to the inferior image quality caused by varied finger thicknesses and vein pattern variations caused by finger axial rotation. To address these issues, we propose a lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) called the Finger-Vein Recognition and AntiSpoofing Network (FVRAS-Net), which integrates the recognition task and the antispoofing task into a unified CNN model by utilizing a multitask learning (MTL) approach and achieves high security and strong real-time performance. Then, a multi-intensity illumination strategy is introduced into the embedded biometric system to automatically select the most informative image for finger-vein identification, which can effectively improve the recognition performance of the real system. Finally, a challenging finger-vein database with images depicting severe axial finger rotation is built for more rigorous validation of the proposed system, which enriches the database resources for the finger-vein recognition community. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed FVRAS-Net achieves excellent performance in both recognition and antispoofing tasks on public data sets, especially on challenging databases with images depicting axial rotation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Signal Processing is the property of Journal of Signal Processing and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

When images are acquired for finger-vein recognition, images with nonuniformity of illumination are often acquired due to varying thickness of fingers or nonuniformity of illumination intensity elements. Accordingly, the recognition performance is significantly reduced as the features being recognized are deformed. To address this issue, previous studies have used image preprocessing methods, such as grayscale normalization or score-level fusion methods for multiple recognition models, which may improve performance in images with a low degree of nonuniformity of illumination. However, the performance cannot be improved drastically when certain parts of images are saturated due to a severe degree of nonuniformity of illumination. To overcome these drawbacks, this study newly proposes a generative adversarial network for the illumination normalization of finger-vein images (INF-GAN). In the INF-GAN, a one-channel image containing texture information is generated through a residual image generation block, and finger-vein texture information deformed by the severe nonuniformity of illumination is restored, thus improving the recognition performance. The proposed method using the INF-GAN exhibited a better performance compared with state-of-the-art methods when the experiment was conducted using two open databases, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University finger-image database version 1, and the Shandong University homologous multimodal traits finger-vein database.

In recent years, the need for security of personal data is becoming progressively important. In this regard, the identification system based on fusion of multibiometric is most recommended for significantly improving and achieving the high performance accuracy. The main purpose of this paper is to propose a hybrid system of combining the effect of tree efficient models: Convolutional neural network (CNN), Softmax and Random forest (RF) classifier based on multi-biometric fingerprint, finger-vein and face identification system. In conventional fingerprint system, image pre-processed is applied to separate the foreground and background region based on K-means and DBSCAN algorithm. Furthermore, the features are extracted using CNNs and dropout approach, after that, the Softmax performs as a recognizer. In conventional fingervein system, the region of interest image contrast enhancement using exposure fusion framework is input into the CNNs model. Moreover, the RF classifier is proposed for classification. In conventional face system, the CNNs architecture and Softmax are required to generate face feature vectors and classify personal recognition. The score provided by these systems is combined for improving Human identification. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on publicly available SDUMLA-HMT real multimodal biometric database using a GPU based implementation. Experimental results on the datasets has shown significant capability for identification biometric system. The proposed work can offer an accurate and efficient matching compared with other system based on unimodal, bimodal, multimodal characteristics.

Among many available biometrics identification methods, finger-vein recognition has an advantage that is difficult to counterfeit, as finger veins are located under the skin, and high user convenience as a non-invasive image capturing device is used for recognition. However, blurring can occur when acquiring finger-vein images, and such blur can be mainly categorized into three types. First, skin scattering blur due to light scattering in the skin layer; second, optical blur occurs due to lens focus mismatching; and third, motion blur exists due to finger movements. Blurred images generated in these kinds of blur can significantly reduce finger-vein recognition performance. Therefore, restoration of blurred finger-vein images is necessary. Most of the previous studies have addressed the restoration method of skin scattering blurred images and some of the studies have addressed the restoration method of optically blurred images. However, there has been no research on restoration methods of motion blurred finger-vein images that can occur in actual environments. To address this problem, this study proposes a new method for improving the finger-vein recognition performance by restoring motion blurred finger-vein images using a modified deblur generative adversarial network (modified DeblurGAN). Based on an experiment conducted using two open databases, the Shandong University homologous multi-modal traits (SDUMLA-HMT) finger-vein database and Hong Kong Polytechnic University finger-image database version 1, the proposed method demonstrates outstanding performance that is better than those obtained using state-of-the-art methods.

Copyright of Journal of Signal Processing is the property of Journal of Signal Processing and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The conventional finger-vein recognition system is trained using one type of database and entails the serious problem of performance degradation when tested with different types of databases. This degradation is caused by changes in image characteristics due to variable factors such as position of camera, finger, and lighting. Therefore, each database has varying characteristics despite the same finger-vein modality. However, previous researches on improving the recognition accuracy of unobserved or heterogeneous databases is lacking. To overcome this problem, we propose a method to improve the finger-vein recognition accuracy using domain adaptation between heterogeneous databases using cycle-consistent adversarial networks (CycleGAN), which enhances the recognition accuracy of unobserved data. The experiments were performed with two open databases—Shandong University homologous multi-modal traits finger-vein database (SDUMLA-HMT-DB) and Hong Kong Polytech University finger-image database (HKPolyU-DB). They showed that the equal error rate (EER) of finger-vein recognition was 0.85% in case of training with SDUMLA-HMT-DB and testing with HKPolyU-DB, which had an improvement of 33.1% compared to the second best method. The EER was 3.4% in case of training with HKPolyU-DB and testing with SDUMLA-HMT-DB, which also had an improvement of 4.8% compared to the second best method.

Abstract Recently, the finger-vein (FV) trait has attracted substantial attentions for personal recognition in biometric community, and some FV-based biometric systems have been well developed in real applications. However, improving the efficiency of FV recognition over a large-scale database remains a big practical problem. Moreover, unreliable finger-vein region of interest (ROI) localization and venous region enhancement can also heavily degrade the performance of a finger-vein based recognition system in practical scenario. In this paper, we first propose some new methods in FV ROI extraction and enhancement, and then an efficient and powerful hierarchical hyper-sphere model (HHsM) is developed based on granular computing (GrC). For HHsM construction, FV image samples from a given FV database are first converted into atomic granules for primary hyper-sphere granule set generation, and then some coarsened granule sets with different granularity levels are born by hyper-sphere granulation. Considering recognition efficiency improvement, a new hierarchical relationship among the coarsened granule sets is established to structure them level-wisely. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed methods perform very well in handling ROI extraction, venous region enhancement and FV recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Finger-vein biometrics have been extensively investigated for person verification. One of the open issues in finger-vein verification is the lack of robustness against variations of vein patterns due to the changes in physiological and imaging conditions during the acquisition process, which results in large intra-class variations among the finger-vein images captured from the same finger and may degrade the system performance. Despite recent advances in biometric template generation and improvement, current solutions mainly focus on the extrinsic biometrics (e.g., fingerprints, face, signature) instead of intrinsic biometrics (e.g., vein). This paper proposes a weighted least square regression based model to generate and improve enrollment template for finger-vein verification. Driven by the primary target of biometric template generation and improvement, i.e., verification error minimization, we assume that a good template has the smallest intra-class distance with respect to the images from the same class in a verification system. Based on this assumption, the finger-vein template generation is converted into an optimization problem. To improve the performance, the weights associated with similarity are computed for template generation. Then, the enrollment template is generated by solving the optimization problem. Subsequently, a template improvement model is proposed to gradually update vein features in the template. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first proposed work of template generation and improvement for finger-vein biometrics. The experimental results on two public finger-vein databases show that the proposed schemes minimize the intra-class variations among samples and significantly improve finger-vein recognition accuracy.

This paper proposes a new finger-vein recognition system that uses a binary robust invariant elementary feature from accelerated segment test feature points and an adaptive thresholding strategy. Subsequently, the proposed a multi-image quality assessments (MQA) are applied to conduct a second stage verification. As oppose to other studies, the region of interest is directly identified using a range of normalized feature point area, which reduces the complexity of pre-processing. This recognition structure allows an efficient feature points matching using a robust feature and rigorous verification using the MQA process. As a result, this method not only reduces the system computation time, comparisons against former relevant studies demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Because of the advantages of finger-vein recognition systems such as live detection and usage as bio-cryptography systems, they can be used to authenticate individual people. However, images of finger-vein patterns are typically unclear because of light scattering by the skin, optical blurring, and motion blurring, which can degrade the performance of finger-vein recognition systems. In response to these issues, a new enhancement method for finger-vein images is proposed. Our method is novel compared with previous approaches in four respects. First, the local and global features of the vein lines of an input image are amplified using Gabor filters in four directions and Retinex filtering, respectively. Second, the means and standard deviations in the local windows of the images produced after Gabor and Retinex filtering are used as inputs for the fuzzy rule and fuzzy membership function, respectively. Third, the optimal weights required to combine the two Gabor and Retinex filtered images are determined using a defuzzification method. Fourth, the use of a fuzzy-based method means that image enhancement does not require additional training data to determine the optimal weights. Experimental results using two finger-vein databases showed that the proposed method enhanced the accuracy of finger-vein recognition compared with previous methods.

The two key factors in a biometric identification system are its high identification rate and convenience of device usage. In a finger-vein identification task, these two problems often occur since the captured device of finger-vein image should accommodate the high identification rate as well as the easy-to-use device design. The finger-vein is visually invisible inside the human skin. This work develops a new finger-vein capturing device using Near-Infrared (NIR) LED light and proposes an efficient technique for finger-vein identification. The vein image may contain noise and shadows due to device lighting conditions. Parametric-Oriented Histogram Equalization (POHE) is utilized to enhance image contrast and reduce the noise effect. This work also discusses normalized issues related to the angle correction of the finger edge and Region of Interest (ROI) for width normalization. In the experimental result, the proposed method yields a clear finger-vein pattern with a superior identification rate in the recognition task compared to the state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional finger-vein recognition systems perform recognition based on the finger-vein lines extracted from the input images or image enhancement, and texture feature extraction from the finger-vein images. In these cases, however, the inaccurate detection of finger-vein lines lowers the recognition accuracy. In the case of texture feature extraction, the developer must experimentally decide on a form of the optimal filter for extraction considering the characteristics of the image database. To address this problem, this research proposes a finger-vein recognition method that is robust to various database types and environmental changes based on the convolutional neural network (CNN). In the experiments using the two finger-vein databases constructed in this research and the SDUMLA-HMT finger-vein database, which is an open database, the method proposed in this research showed a better performance compared to the conventional methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extracting reliable finger-vein features directly from original finger-vein images is not an easy task since the captured finger-vein images are always poor in quality. This paper proposes an effective method of finger-vein feature representation based on adaptive vector field estimation. Considering that the vein networks consist of vein curve segments, a set of spatial curve filters (SCFs) with variations in curvature and orientation are first designed. To fit vein curves locally and closely, SCFs is then weighted using a variable Gaussian model. Due to the fact that finger veins vary in diameters naturally, an effective curve length field (CLF) estimation method is proposed to make weighted SCFs adaptive to vein-width variations. Finally, with CLF constrain, vein vector fields(VVF) are built for finger-vein network feature description. Experimental results show that the proposed method is highly powerful in improving finger-vein matching accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]