See

discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282071853

Finger vein recognition using Gabor filter and

Support Vector Machine

Article February 2015

DOI: 10.1109/IPAS.2014.7043263

CITATIONS READS

4 101

5 authors, including:

Souad Khellat Kihel Reza Abrishambaf

Universit degli Studi di Sassari Miami University, Hamilton
3 PUBLICATIONS 12 CITATIONS 24 PUBLICATIONS 63 CITATIONS

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

Naan Cardoso Joo Monteiro

18 PUBLICATIONS 7 CITATIONS University of Minho
122 PUBLICATIONS 471 CITATIONS
SEE PROFILE

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

MEMS Accelerometers Testing View project

Industrial Monitoring and Control with Wireless Sensor Networks View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Souad Khellat Kihel on 28 November 2016.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. All in-text references underlined in blue are added to the original document
and are linked to publications on ResearchGate, letting you access and read them immediately.
IEEE IPAS14: INTERNATIONAL IMAGE PROCESSING APPLICATIONS AND SYSTEMS CONFERENCE 2014 1

Finger Vein Recognition Using Gabor Filter and

Support Vector Machine

Souad Khellat-kihel1,2, Reza abrishambaf2, Nuno Cardoso2, Joo Monteiro2, Mohamed Benyettou1
1
Laboratory of Modeling and Optimization of Industrial Systems (LAMOSI)
Department of Informatics, Faculty of Mathematic and Informatics
University of Sciences and Technology Mohamed-Boudiaf
B.P. 1505 EL MNAOUER 31000 ORAN ALGERIA.
Email:khellatsouad@yahoo.fr
2
Centro Algoritmi
University of Minho, Campus of Azurm
4800-058, Guimares
PORTUGAL

Abstract Nowadays biometric identification systems are
widely spread since the safety of those systems has been proven.
They exhibit a large number of advantages when compared to
other identification systems such as key and password that are
subject to falsification and loss. Among biometric systems, finger
vein recognition based on venous network has been considered
recently in the literatures. This paper aims to present a finger
vein recognition system using Support Vector Machine (SVM)
based on a supervised training algorithm. The proposed system is
divided in several phases, each performing a specific task. Two
pre-processing schemes are employed in order to assess the
efficiency in terms of recognition rate. Simulation results show
that using Gabor filters in preprocessing for codifying the venous
network and SVM for the classification can improve the
recognition rate when compared to the existing methods.
Keywords Biometrics, Venous Network, Support Vector
Machines, Classification.
I. INTRODUCTION
Biometric refers to an identification and authentication
technology which consists of transforming biological,
morphological and behavioral characteristics into a numerical
print [1]. The characteristics vary from face, fingerprints, hand
geometry, handwriting, iris, retinal, vein, and voice. Recently
finger vein has been adopted in biometric systems [1].
In the 1990s researchers have found that the venous
system was unique to each individual [2]. The veins of the
finger are a network of blood vessels under the skin and they
can be used for biometric identification [3].
In addition to unicity, universality, permanence and
measurability, the systems based on the fingers venous
network are much more robust against fraudulent reproduction
978-1-4799-7069-8/14/$31.00 2014 IEEE
than other biometric systems. The fingers veins
authentication technology has several important characteristics
[2-3]:
Resistant to criminal tampering: because veins are
inside the body, there is a lower risk of falsification.
Unique and constant: finger vein patterns are different
even among identical twins and remain constant during
the humans lifetime.
Contactless acquisition: near-infrared light are used for
image acquisition which, therefore, leads to have a
non-invading and contactless acquisition to ensure both
convenience and cleanliness of the users.
Simple feature extraction: the fingers venous network
is relatively stable and clearly captured, enabling the
use of low-resolution cameras to take vein images with
small-size and perform simple image processing.
Naoto Miura [3] proposed a matching by using a
binarization of the veins images and for the elimination of the
noise a transform of distance was used. For the recognition,
the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) was employed. The
disadvantages of this system are the huge amount of time for
processing and the method is not able to recognize the
deformed veins images. In [4], they extracted the minutiae
(bifurcations and terminations) and then they used the
Hausdorff distance to analyze the similarities between
minutiae. Jinfeng Yang [5] proposed a recognition system
based on a combination of Gabor wavelets and a circular
Gabor filter. For the classification a similarity measure has
been used. This method shows a good performance when a
Gabor filter is used. The general algorithm of [6] includes the
IEEE IPAS14: INTERNATIONAL IMAGE PROCESSING APPLICATIONS AND SYSTEMS CONFERENCE 2014 2

2D Gabor filters and then the Euclidean distance is calculated. surface. In the case of the "light transmission", the finger is
However this process involves several comparison stages. In placed between the image sensor and the light source and the
[7] Xi Chen et al used the Maximum Margin Locality near-infrared light passes through the finger where it is
Preserving Projection (MMLPP) for the discriminative feature captured by the image sensor.
extraction. Chaotic Random Projection was used for
cancellable biometric template generation.
The main disadvantages of the mentioned works are the
use of the total image with distance calculations which
requires more memory and execution time. Considering those
methods, one can conclude the effectiveness of the Gabor
filter. For this reason, we adopted the Gabor filter for the
enhancement and feature extraction to extract 256 features,
presenting these features with only one representative vector (a) (b)
instead of the total 2D veins image. This codification with
Gabor filter is used for the fingerprint [8] however it has not Fig. 1. (a) Light reflection method, (b) Image captured by the reflection
been used for the codification of the veins images. The method
Support Vector Machine (SVM) based on supervised training
been proposed for recognizing the individuals with their finger
vein images. This has been shown for a long time convergence
during the classification. There are researches in the literatures
showing that the SVM has been used for the finger veins
images but with another objective. For instance, in [9], they
used the SVM to classify the local areas in the finger vein
images. Local areas that includes a large, medium and small
amount of vein patterns. Lu Yang ([10] evaluated the quality (a) (b)
of finger vein images using SVM with classifying the finger
vein images into two classes namely, high and low quality Fig. 2.: (a) Light transmission method, (b) Image captured by the transmission
method
finger vein images. Kuan-Quan Wang [11] used SVM for
classification but they used the Gaussian filter in the pre-
processing and the LBPV (Local Binary Pattern Variance) for
the feature extraction. Kang Ryoung Park [12] used the SVM III. THE SUPPORT VECTOR MACHINES
for combining the Hamming distance and the Euclidean
distance. Additionally this is a binary SVM meaning that the In the recent years, new methods of learning are developed
output is genuine or imposter. Moreover the SVM has shown a based on the statistical learning theory of Vapnik and
good performance on the other biometric modalities Chervonenkis. One of these methods, called Support Vector
(fingerprint [8], palm print [13]). Machine (SVM). The SVM is a group of training techniques
intended to solve problems of discrimination (to decide to
The remaining of this paper is structured as follows: the which class a pattern belongs) or regression (to predict the
finger vein capturing is presented in section 2. Section 3 numerical value of a variable).
presents the Support Vector Machines. The proposed
architecture of the finger vein recognition demonstrated in The classifier uses the idea of the optimal hyper plane to
section 4. The experimental results on the PKU V4 and PKU calculate a border between groups of points. There are many
V2 databases are presented in section 5. Finally, section 6 linear classifiers (hyper planes) that separate the data.
concludes the paper. However only one of these achieves maximum separation. The
objective of the SVM is not only to find a separator between
the classes but finding the optimum hyper plane.
II. VENOUS NETWORK CAPTURING
To overcome the disadvantages of non-linearity case, the
Vein patterns are invisible to the naked eye and at the same
SVM change the data space by using the Kernel (in our case
time visible by a sensor sensitive to near-infrared light (wave
we used the Gaussian kernel). The nonlinear transformation
lengths between 700 and 1000 nanometres) [2-3]. Near-
may allow a linear separation for the examples in a new space.
infrared light passes through the tissues of the human body
This new space is called space of characteristics Fig. 3.
and it is blocked by dyes such as haemoglobin or melanin. As
haemoglobin exists densely in blood vessels, near-infrared
light shining causes the veins to appear as dark lines of shade
in the captured image [3].
There are two methods used for capturing vein pattern
images: "light reflection" Fig. 1[2] and "light transmission"
Fig. 2[2]. In the case of "light reflection" the light source and
the image sensor are placed on the same side of the finger and
the image sensor captures the reflected light of the finger Fig. 3. The non linearity
IEEE IPAS14: INTERNATIONAL IMAGE PROCESSING APPLICATIONS AND SYSTEMS CONFERENCE 2014 3

The SVMs approach passes through two steps (Fig. 4):
Training: The search for an optimal hyper plane of
separation by maximizing the margin, with the
resolution of a quadratic program and determination of
the Lagrange multipliers [14].
Test: after the determination of the Lagrange
multipliers, it applies the decision function to the test
examples for class determination [14].
This can limit the amplification of the noise and increase more
local contrast. CLAHE can be computed as follows:
255
S = Hist (i ) * (1)
M *M
where Hist is the cumulative distribution of the local
histogram and it reflects the number of appearance of the gray
levels in a portion i of the image. S is the new value of the
pixel and M is the size of the local window (Fig. 7).

Optimal Capture Enhancement

Feature extraction
and codification Classification
Transformation Hyperplane
Input space (x) Features space Class(x)
()

Fig. 4. The Support Vector Machine steps

Result
SVM

The principle of SVM explained in the previous part is

summarized in solving binary classification problems, but the
problems encountered in reality are the multi classes type and
hence the importance to extend the SVM principle to problems Codes veins images
database
more than two classes. There were several attempts to
combine binary classifiers to determine this problem (multi
classes). There are also tests to incorporate the classification Fig.5. The finger vein recognition process
of several classes in the process of SVM so that all the classes Histogram
are treated simultaneously. The main methods for this issue Equalization
Median Filter Segmentation
are One Versus One and One versus All [15]. The SVM One-
Versus-All suppose the construction of N classifiers and N
comparisons for the decision however the SVM OneVersus-
One require N (N-1)/2 classifiers for a problem of N classes.
Gabor Filter

IV. THE PROPOSED APPROACH Fig. 6. The image enhancement process

Since biometric system is a pattern recognition system, it
is composed of several modules and we tried to improve each
module as presented in this section. Fig. 5 presents the general
architecture of our recognition system.
Recognition through the venous network depends mainly
on the quality of captured images, so it is essential to integrate
the preprocessing module to improve the quality of the
images.

A. Image Enhancement (a) (b)

As Fig. 6 shows two preprocessing schemes are used in the

proposed approach. The first method is based on Histogram
Equalization and Median Filter and the second one is based on
Gabor filter only. The reason for using two methods is to
better understand the efficiency of the Gabor filter.
1) Histogram Equalization and Median Filter :
The image Histogram Equalization is used to adjust the
distribution of the gray levels. However this method is not
suitable for the finger vein images [16]. (c) (d)
The Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization
(CLAHE) [17] serves to limit the size of the local histogram. Fig.7. (a) original image, (b) the histogram of (a), (c) the preprocessed image
with CLAHE, (d) the histogram of (c).
IEEE IPAS14: INTERNATIONAL IMAGE PROCESSING APPLICATIONS AND SYSTEMS CONFERENCE 2014
The median filter step aims to reduce the noise and the
irregularities of the image to improve the visual quality of the
image. Fig. 8 represents the result of median filter.
Fig.8. The preprocessed image with the CLAHE and median filter
In real applications, the segmentation of images of finger
vein networks is still a critical step to extract finger vein
features from veins images since the finger vein images are in
low contrast. We applied the thresholding segmentation
method with a global threshold. The objective is to extract the
venous network from the background (Fig. 9).
(a) (b)
Fig.9. (a) Preprocessed image, (b) Segmented image
2) Gabor Filter
In our system the enhancement also consists of the 2D Gabor
filter: This Bi-dimensional filter has shown great efficiency for
the finger vein images enhancement fusing the phase and
direction features to identify the finger vein [18-19]. Because the
finger vein consists of many lines, it has stable and obvious
direction which makes it suitable to be viewed as a texture image.
2D Gabor filters are widely used for extracting the features of
textured images.
This version of the 2D Gabor filter is basically a bi-
dimensional Gaussian function centered at origin (0, 0). Fig. 10
depicts the finger vein image and the result of the Gabor filter.
(a) (b)
Fig. 10. (a) The finger vein image, (b) The enhanced finger vein image
B. The feature extraction
A Gabor filter based approach was developed by Youssef
et al in [20] where a bank of Gabor filters have been used to
4
produce a feature vector called FingerCode. This technique
does not use singular points explicitly and it is robust to noise.
We have chosen the characteristics texture extraction of veins
images by the Gabor filter that captures the local orientation
and the information of the frequencies of the venous network.
Therefore they are adapted for the extraction of texture
fingerprint image information [20]. We tried to extract the
characteristics from texture of the images with representing
the finger veins by a vector of 256 elements. The general
shape of this filter [8] is given in (2):
2 2
1 x ' y'
G ( x, y , f , ) = exp{ [ 2 + 2 ]}cos(2 fx ') (2)
2 x' y'
x ' = x sin + y cos
(3)
y ' = x sin y cos
Where f is the frequency of the sine plane wave along the
direction from the x-axis, and x and x are space constants
of the Gaussian envelope along x and y ,respectively. As a
result, we obtain a vector of 256 elements to represent the
image of the venous network. This features vector will be used
for learning and classification of the individuals.
C. The classification
For classification we used the Support Vector Machines
for the solids mathematical bases which support it with two
algorithms One-Versus-One and One-Versus-All and for the
kernel we use the Gaussian.
In the One-Versus-One approach, each class is
discriminated from another requiring N (N-1)/2 functions
decisions (classifiers) but in the One-Versus-All, each class is
opposed to all the others and requires N decisions functions.
We have used two different databases the first one is
composed of 20 individuals each individual has 10 catches of
index, available on the Internet from the PKU (V2) databases
but the second one is composed of 20 individuals each
individual has 8 catches of index, PKU Finger Vein Database
(V2,V4), available at [21] (Fig. 11):
(a) Image from DB1 (b) Image from DB2
Fig. 11. Comparison of the acquired image
The two approaches were used with a training and a test
set. The training set consists of 20 classes (individuals) with
six trials for each class that result 120 feature vectors in total.
The test set also contains 20 classes with four other tests for
each class and therefore a total of 80 features vectors
representing the venous networks. This process related to the
IEEE IPAS14: INTERNATIONAL IMAGE PROCESSING APPLICATIONS AND SYSTEMS CONFERENCE 2014 5

first database. The same partition was applied to the
database i.e. 60% of the captures will correspond
learning phase and 40 % for the test. The different
obtained by these approaches will be discussed
following section.
V. RESULTS
The evaluation of any biometric recognition system is to
determine the recognition rate which represents the probability
which the system can identify a person who already exists in
the data bases. We applied two types of the pre-processing.
The first pre-processing (P1) consist of the contrast
amelioration, the application of the median filter and the
segmentation. However the second pre-processing (P2) consist
of the 2D Gabor filter application. We represent also our
results with the ROC curve (Fig. 12).
TABLE I. RECOGNITION RATE
Data
Data Bases 1
Bases
second (ODLPP) algorithm to reduce the dimensionality of high-
to the dimensional Gabor feature vector. The LDA, LPP, DLPP,
results OLPP, and ONPP adopt the PCA for the pre-processing
in the however the last method ODLPP used the Gabor filter for the
pre-processing and all these works apply an Euclidean metric
based on the nearest neighbour classifier. Their effort is to
approve the effectiveness of the ODLPP.
PCA: Principal Components Analysis.
LPP: Locality Preserving Projection.
DLPP: Discriminant Locality Preserving
Projection.
OLPP: Orthogonal Locality Preserving
Projection.
ONPP: Orthogonal Neighbour Preserving Projection.
ODLPP: Orthogonal Discriminant Locality Preserving
Projection.
Fig. 12 presents the ROC curve for the recognition system
demonstrating the recognition rate versus the False Acceptance
Rate (FAR). Fig. 13 depicts the recognition rate of the
Data Bases 2 proposed system when comparing with the existing methods.

VI. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORKS

Pre-
processin P1 P2 P1 P2 In this paper, a finger vein recognition system based on
g SVM has been presented. The proposed approach contains
several phases, namely, acquisition, enhancement, feature
Support One- One-
One One One One extraction and classification. The system has been
One- - One- - - - implemented in MATLAB with real images from two
Vector Vers Vers
Versus- Vers Versu Ver Ver Ver
Machine
All
us- us-
us- s-All sus- sus- sus-
databases. In the pre-processing phase, two methods have
s One All been used: the first method was based on histogram
One One All One
Rate
equalization, median filter and segmentation. The second
98.7 98.7 93. 93.
recogniti 93.33 95
5 5
91.66 95
33 33 method was based on a 2D Gabor filter. The reason for having
on (%) two pre-processing methods was to demonstrate how Gabor
filter performs comparing to other methods. Also, in the
feature extraction phase, Gabor filters have been used. In the
first database, Gabor filter pre-processing exhibits a better
recognition rate. However, in the second database, the first
pre-processing scheme performs better in One-Versus-One.
As a future work, the proposed approach will be tested on
other databases. We will focus on the integration of Region of
Interest (RoI) into the venous system and possibly establishing
a multimodal scheme where several biometric systems will be
combined to form a unit identification system.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Souad Khellat-kihel is supported by the Erasmus Mundus
program EU-MARE NOSTRUM (EUMN) grant agreement
number: 2011-4050/001-001-EMA2. This work has been
supported by FCT - Fundao para a Cincia e Tecnologia
within the Project Scope: Pest-OE/EEI/UI0319/2014.
Fig. 12. The finger vein ROC curve

In Table 2, we put different results on the PKU V2 (i.e.

DB1) database. Xi Chen and Jiashu Zhang [22] proposed the
methods given at the table II, they includes the Gabor based
Optimized Discriminant Locality Preserving Projections
IEEE IPAS14: INTERNATIONAL IMAGE PROCESSING APPLICATIONS AND SYSTEMS CONFERENCE 2014 6

TABLE II. PREVIOUS WORKS [11] W. KUAN-QUAN, S. KRISA, XIANG-QIAN WU and QIU-Sm ZHAO,
finger vein recognition using LBP variance with global matching,
Proceedings of the International Conference on Wavelet Analysis and
Study Recognition Pattern Recognition, Xian, 15-17 July, 2012.
Method
Rate [12] P. Kang Ryoung finger vein recognition by combining global and local
[22] PCA 88.5% features based on SVM, Computing and Informatics, Vol. 30,295309,
2011.
[22]
[13] W. Boukhari and M. Benyettou, Identification Biomtrique des
LPP 91.65%
Individus par leurs Empreintes Palmaires Palmprints: Classification
[22] par la Mthode des Sparateurs Vaste Marge (SVM), CIIA 2009.
DLPP 92.54%
[22] [14] N. Ayat, Slection de modle automatique des machines vecteurs de
OLPP 93.86% support - application la reconnaissance dimages de chiffres
manuscrits, Thse de doctorat, Ecole De Technologie Suprieure,
[22]
Qubec, 2004.
ONPP 93.88%
[22] [15] S. Khellat-kihel , Reconnaissance des individus par leurs rseaux
ODLPP 95.17% veineux, master thesis, Univesity of sciences and technology USTO-
Proposed SVM MB, 2012.
98.75% [16] L. Caixia, The Research on Finger Vein Image Preprocessing Based on
method (proposed)
Mathematical Morphology, College of Information Science and
Engineering, Zaozhuang University, China, Springer-Verlag London
Limited ,2012.
[17] K. Wang, Z. Yuan, Finger vein recognition based on wavelet moment
fused with PCA transform, J Pattern Recognition and Artificial
Intelligence, Chinese, 2007; S. 692-697.
[18] P. Prabhakar, T. Thomas, Finger Vein Identification Based On
Minutiae Feature Extraction With Spurious Minutiae Removal. 3rd Int.
Conf. on Advances in Computing and Communications, IEEE
Computer society, 2013.
[19] K.Wang, L. Jingyu and P.Oluwatoyin, Finger Vein Identification Based
On 2-D Gabor Filter, 2nd Int. Conf. on Industrial Mechatronics and
Automation, 2010 .
[20] Y. Elmir, Lidentification biomtrique par les empreintes digitales,
Mmoire de magister, Universit des Sciences et de la Technologie
d'Oran USTO-MB, LAMOSI, 2007.
Fig. 13. SVM recognition rate comparing with the existing results [21] LI Wenxin, http://ai.pku.edu.cn/
[22] X. Chen and Z. Jiashu, Optimized Discriminant Locality Preserving
Projection of Gabor Feature for Biometric Recognition, International
REFERENCES Journal of Security and Its Applications Vol. 6, No. 2, April 2012 .
[1] B. Wassila, Identification biomtrique des individus par leurs
empreintes palmaires, Mmoire de magister , Universit des Sciences
et de la Technologie d'Oran USTO-MB, 2007.
[2] Hitachi, Finger Vein Authentication- White Paper, Copyright , 2006.
[3] M. Naoto, A. Nagasaka, and M. Takafumi, Feature extraction of
finger-vein patterns based on repeated line tracking and its application to
personal identification, Machine Vision and Applications, Springer-
Verlag, 2004; S. 194 -203.
[4] Y. Chengbo, Q. Huafeng, Biometric Identification Technology Finger
Vein Identification Technology, Tsinghua University Press , Chinese,
2009; S. 81-87.
[5] J. Yang, Combination of gaborwavelets and circular gabor filter for
finger-vein extraction, Lecture Notes in Computer Science,
September2009, S.346-354.
[6] Z. Hong, L. Zhi and Z. Qijun, Finger vein recognition based on Gabor
filter, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, 2013.
[7] X. Chen, X. Bai and X.Tao, Chaotic Random Projection for
Cancelable Biometric Key Generation, Springer-Verlag Berlin
Heidelberg, 2013.
[8] Y. Elmir, Z. Elberrichi and R. Adjoudj, Support vector Machine
Based Fingerprint identification, CTCI 2012 conference , Adrar
university, Algeria , 2012.
[9] L. Hyeon Chang, K. Byung Jun, L. Eui Chul and P. Kang Ryoung ,
Finger vein recognition using weighted local binary pattern code based
on a support vector machine, Journal of Zhejiang University: Science
C (Impact Factor: 0.3).01/2010; 11:514-524.
[10] Y. Lu, Y. Gongping, Y. Yilong and Rongyang Xiao, Finger vein
image quality evaluation using support vector machines, Opt. Eng.
52(2), 027003 (Feb 18, 2013). doi:10.1117/1.OE.52.2.027003 ,2013.

View publication stats