Ensembling Scale Invariant and Multiresolution Gabor Scores for Palm Vein Identification

Biometric recognition based on palm vein trait has the advantages of liveness detection and high level of security. An improved human palm vein identification system based on ensembling the scores computed from scale invariant features and multiresolution adaptive Gabor features is proposed. In the training phase, from the input palm vein images, the interested palm regions are segmented using 3-valley point maximal palm extraction strategy, an improved method that extracts the maximal region of interest (ROI) easily and properly. Extracted ROI is enhanced using contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization method. From the enhanced image, local invariant features are extracted by applying scale invariant feature transform (SIFT). The texture and multiresolution features are extracted by employing adaptive Gabor filter over the enhanced image. These two features, scale invariant and multiresolution Gabor features act as the templates. In the testing phase, for the test images, ROI extraction, image enhancement, and two different feature extractions are performed. Using cosine similarity and match count-based classification, the score, Ss is computed for the SIFT features. Another score, Sg is computed using the normalized Hamming distance measure for the Gabor features. Both these scores are ensembled using the weighted sum rule to produce the final score, SF for identifying the person.  Experiments conducted with CASIA multispectral palmprint image database version 1.0 and VERA palm vein database show that, the proposed method achieves equal error rate of 0.026% and 0.0205% respectively. For these databases, recognition rate of 99.73% and 99.89% respectively are obtained which is superior to the state-of-the-art methods in authentication and identification. The proposed work is suitable for applications wherein the authenticated person should not be considered as imposter.