An algorithm for finger-vein segmentation based on modified repeated line tracking

Abstract

Image segmentation is an important step for finger-vein identification technique. However, it is difficult to extract precise details of the image because of the irregular noise and shades around the finger-vein. The repeated line tracking algorithm achieves good segmentation performance for low quality images of finger-vein, but it has some drawbacks such as low robustness and efficiency. In this paper, a modified repeated line tracking algorithm is proposed for image segmentation of finger-vein. Firstly, we propose a segmentation method called threshold image to execute rough segmentation and obtain binary and skeleton image of finger-vein. Secondly, the width of finger-vein is estimated based on the binary and skeleton image. The parameters are revised according to the width. Then, the modified repeated line tracking algorithm is executed to figure out the locus space of finger-vein based on the revised parameters. Finally, processing results are obtained by using Otsu algorithm which executes exact segmentation on the locus space. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm is more robust and efficient than traditional repeated line tracking algorithm.

Keywords:

• finger-vein
• image segmentation
• repeated line tracking
• biometric identification

The authors would like to thank the anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions. The research described in this paper has been supported by the Foundation of People’s Bank of China under grant no. 2007L24-G4.