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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.

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.

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]

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]

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]

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]

This paper presents a new approach to improve the performance of finger-vein identification systems presented in the literature. The proposed system simultaneously acquires the finger-vein and low-resolution fingerprint images and combines these two evidences using a novel score-level combination strategy. We examine the previously proposed finger-vein identification approaches and develop a new approach that illustrates it superiority over prior published efforts. The utility of low-resolution fingerprint images acquired from a webcam is examined to ascertain the matching performance from such images. We develop and investigate two new score-level combinations, i.e., holistic and nonlinear fusion, and comparatively evaluate them with more popular score-level fusion approaches to ascertain their effectiveness in the proposed system. The rigorous experimental results presented on the database of 6264 images from 156 subjects illustrate significant improvement in the performance, i.e., both from the authentication and recognition experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]