Feature extraction techniques for dorsal hand vein pattern

So far many biometric systems such as fingerprint, palm print and iris have been developed for several years. Nowadays, many researchers are interested in developing new and more efficient biometric systems by using alternative features. In line with this, a newer characteristic that is dorsal hand vein patterns are used to identify an individual because its uniqueness, reliability, permanence and difficulty to forge. To develop a dorsal hand vein biometric security system, the hand vein images are first captured using an appropriate setup. Several preprocessing techniques are then applied to obtain a thinned version of the image. One challenging phase in biometric security system is the feature extraction phase. In this work, three feature extraction and representation techniques namely Hough lines transform, Pixel by Pixel Method and Directional Coding Method have been explored and implemented. These techniques are applied on 500 images obtained from 100 individuals of different age. For matching, Mahalanobis Distance and Correlation Percentage have been used. From the experimental results, it was deduced that Pixel by Pixel Method proved to be the best feature extraction technique with a False Rejection Rate (FRR) of 0.03%.