Guided Gabor Filter for Finger Vein Pattern Extraction

In this paper, a novel explicit image filter, called Guided Gabor filter, is proposed to extract the finger vein pattern without any segmentation processing, and lower performance reduction for poor quality images which result from low contrast, illumination, or noise effects, etc. The proposed filter is contributed for finger vein enhancement, noise reduction, and haze removal without being affected by the brightness of the vein. It performs well not only on ridge detection like the Gabor filter, but on image enhancement as an edge-preserving smoothing operator without the gradient reversal artifacts. The experimental results show that the proposed method is able to get vein pattern more clearly and faster than the existing methods, and improve the matching performance with higher recognition rate.