Biometric Identification through

Palm and Dorsal Hand Vein Patterns

Sanchit, Maurcio Ramalho
Instituto de Telecomunicaes
Lisbon, Portugal
{sanchit, mar}@lx.it.pt

Abstract Hand vein patterns are among the biometric traits

being investigated today for identification purposes, attracting
interest from both the research community and industry. This
paper presents a multimodal system that combines hand-palm
vein and hand-dorsal vein biometrics information at the score
level. The palm and dorsal veins are considered as texture
samples being automatically extracted from the users hand
image. A 2D Gabor filter is employed for texture feature
extraction. For matching, the newly acquired biometric samples
are compared with those stored in the system database, at the
enrolment stage. The metric used is based on the Hamming
distance. A palm and dorsal vein database is built using the
proposed acquisition system. This paper proposes a novel
multimodal system that combines palm and dorsal vein
information at the score level, with the experimental results
showing that with the proposed system a much lower Equal
Error Rate (EER) can be achieved, in comparison to existing
unimodal systems.
Keywords; Biometrics identification; multimodal biometrics;
palm vein; dorsal vein; biometrics fusion.

I.

INTRODUCTION

Biometric recognition systems based on hand vein patterns

are becoming popular as they contain properties like
universality, uniqueness, stability and strong immunity to
forgery. Since the veins lie underneath the skin and are, in most
cases, not visible to the naked eye, they provide a strong
resistance against forgery. The complex vascular pattern
present inside the hand allows the computation of a good set of
features that can be used for personal identification.
An infrared sensor can be used to capture the pattern of the
subject's veins when illuminated by a source of infrared
radiation. The veins can be imaged since the haemoglobin in
the blood is oxygenated in the lungs and carries oxygen to the
tissues of the body through the arteries. After it releases its
oxygen to the tissues, the deoxidized haemoglobin returns to
the heart through the veins. Unlike the oxygenated
haemoglobin, the deoxidized haemoglobin absorbs light at a
wavelength of about 760nm, which is in the range of nearinfrared (NIR) band. Therefore, when the palm is illuminated
with near-infrared light, unlike the image seen by the human
eye, the deoxidized haemoglobin in the palm veins appears as a
dark pattern [1,2].

Paulo Lobato Correia1,2, Lus Ducla Soares1,3

1

Instituto de Telecomunicaes, 2Instituto Superior Tcnico,

3
Instituto Universitrio de Lisboa
Lisbon, Portugal
{plc, lds}@lx.it.pt

Most of the reported research efforts concerning biometric

hand vein identification have considered using as biometric
traits the vein pattern in the dorsal or palm parts of the hand, as
well as the finger veins [3]. This paper uses the two types of
hand vein patterns (palm and dorsal) for identification
purposes. An additional issue addressed in this paper has to do
with the best way to combine dorsal and palm veins to develop
a multimodal system. In fact, most of the reported unimodal
systems do not perform sufficiently well for the identification,
while multimodal systems promise a better performance than
the best of its individual components [4]. The proposed
multimodal biometric system is based on features extracted
from hand vein images by means of Gabor filtering [5]. Data
fusion is done at the score level using the sum rule and then a
threshold is applied for the final identification decision [6,7].
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. The
proposed hardware setup and design, including pre-processing,
feature extraction and matching modules are described in
Section II. In Section III, some experimental results are
presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed
multimodal biometric system. Finally, conclusions and future
work are discussed in Section IV.
II.

PROPOSED SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE

The overall architecture of the proposed biometric

identification system is illustrated in Figure 1. Each of the
constituent modules is described in the following.

Figure 1. System Architecture.

A. Image Acquisition System

In this research, a JAI AD-080GE camerra [8] was used to
capture NIR hand vein images. The camera contains two 1/3
progressive scan Charge-Coupled Devicces (CCD) with
1024x768 active pixels; one of the CCDs is
i used to capture
visible light images (400 to 700 nm), while the other captures
light in NIR band of the spectrum (700 too 1000 nm). This
paper exploits only the NIR images that contain
c
the hands
vein pattern. Figure 2 shows the spectral respponse curve of the
cameras NIR sensor.

hand dorsal veins. The databaase contains 1400 NIR images

collected from 70 distinct subjjects and it will be used to test
the performance of the identifiication algorithms. Each subject
provided 10 images from the back
b
of the hand and 10 images
from the palm, for both left annd right hands. The images were
saved in Tagged Image Filee Format (TIFF), which is an
uncompressed image format, with a resolution of 1024x768
pixels and 8 bits per pixel.
B. Pre-processing
The two main objectives off the pre-processing module are:
(i) to extract the palm and baack of the hand areas from the
input images, which constitutee the regions of interest (ROIs)
for identification purposes; and
a
(ii) to remove noise and
enhance the contrast of the ROIs. ROI is automatically
extracted with the help of fourr auxiliary reference points that
are computed automatically froom the contour, as illustrated in
Figure 4. Each ROI is then rootated so that its sides become
parallel to the sides of the imagge and resized to a standard size
(e.g., 128x128) [9]. The idenntification matching procedure
(explained in sub-section II.D
D) will only be attempted with
hands of the same type, either left
l or right.

Figure 2. Spectral response of the cameras NIR CCD.

Since most light sources don't irradiatte with sufficient

intensity in the NIR part of the spectrum, a dedicated NIR
lighting system was built using infrared Lighht Emitting Diodes
(LED), which have a peak wavelength at 8300 nm.
The hardware setup consists of the above mentioned
camera and two IR LED arrays placed arouund the camera, as
shown in Figure 3.
Figure 4. ROIs of the froont and back of the hand.

Figure 3. Hardware setup for the hand vein acquuisition system.

The camera was mounted on a stand and

a adjusted to a
height of approximately 45 cm above the base-board, which is
T connection to
covered in black to avoid light reflections. The
the computer is done using a regular RJ-45 network
n
cable.
Using this acquisition system setup, a hand
h
vein database
was built, including images from both the hand
h
palm and the

Since the palm and dorsal veins are different in terms of

visibility, structure and noise present
p
in the acquired images,
different pre-processing technniques for noise reduction and
image enhancement were appliied. For the palm vein ROIs, the
first step is speckle noise removal, by applying a median filter.
Then, to suppress the effect of
o high frequency noise, a 2D
Wiener filter was applied, assuuming that Gaussian white noise
is present in the images [100]. To enhance vein visibility
contrast limited adaptive histtogram equalization is applied,
improving the resulting image contrast.
For the hand dorsal vein ROIs,
R
first contrast is improved;
then impulsive noise is remooved by applying an averaging
filter. Additionally, the back of
o the hand often includes hair,
which should be, as much as
a possible, removed from the
image. For this purpose, andd assuming that hairs can be
viewed as linear noise, morpphological opening and closing
filters are employed using a linne structuring element. Finally,
a 2D Wiener filter is used foor removing any small artifacts
remaining in the image [1]. Figgures 5 and 6 illustrate the major
steps of pre-processing for bothh types of images.

G DC = G [ x, y , , u, ]

(a)

(c)

(b))

i = n j = n

( 2n + 1)

(0)

where (2n+1)2 is the size of thhe filter. The parameters for the
experiments were chosen accorrding to [5]. For each frequency
and standard deviation values of
o the filters, four directions are
considered: 0, /4, /2 and 3
/4. Then, each Gabor filter is
convolved with the vein imagges and for each filter direction
two matrices are obtained, forr the real and imaginary parts.
These two matrices are convverted into binary form by the
following inequalities:

(d))

Figure 5. Major steps of preprocessing of hand paalm images. (a) ROI;

(b) after median filter; (c) after wiener filter; (d)) enhanced image.

G [i, j , , u, ]

1,if Reall[GDC * Image] 0,

bitreal =
0,if Reall[GDC * Image] < 0,

(0)

1,if Imagiinary[GDC * Image] 0,

bitimaginary =
0,if Imagginary[GDC * Image] < 0,

(0)

The resulting binary matrices are the features to be used for

the matching process.
D. Matching
The same matching proceedure, based upon normalized
Hamming distance between binnary feature matrices, is applied
to both types of images. The normalized Hamming distance
D0 can be defined for two binarry feature matrices, A and B as
n

(a)

(b))

D0 =

[Re( A(i, j )) Re( B(i, j )) + Im( A(i, j )) Im( B(i, j ))]

i =1 j =1

2N * N

(0)

The normalized Hamming disstance takes values between 0

and 1, where 0 corresponds to a perfect match.
III.

(c)

(d))

Figure 6. Major steps of preprocessing of hand dorsal images. (a)

ROI; (b) enhanced image; (c) hair removal; (dd) filtered image.

C. Feature Extraction
The extraction of features for identificattion based on vein
information uses Gabor filters, in a similar way
w as done in [5]
for identification based on hand palm textures. Gabor filtering
has been widely and successfully deployed for
f texture analysis
[11], character recognition [12], fingerprintt recognition [13],
iris recognition [14] and face recognition [115]. A circular 2D
Gabor filter is defined as the product of a sinnusoidal wave with
a Gaussian envelope. The Gabor filter is applied using the
following formula:

RIMENTAL RESULTS
EXPER

Experiments were performeed using the database built with

the proposed image acquisition system. For the experiments,
parameters of Gabor filter were
w
chosen as: frequency =
0.0916, standard deviation = 5.6179
5
and filter size = 35x35.
For identification purposes, 5 templates from each hand
modality are registered into the system database and the
remaining 5 templates from thee same hand are used for testing
purposes.
For the multimodal system,, the outputs obtained with both
the palm and dorsal veins (i.e., the distance scores computed
with the normalized Hamming distance) are fused at the score
level [7] and then thresholdded, to determine whether the
identification attempt is genuuine or not. In this paper, the
simple SUM-rule classifier iss used, computing the overall
distance score as follows:
Score =

Score _ Doorsal + Score _ Palm

2

(0)

where Score_Dorsal and Score_Palm are the normalized

distance scores of the hand palm and dorsal veins,
respectively. Finally this Score is thresholded to reach the
multimodal system decision:

accept , Score t
Decision =
,
reject , otherwise

(0)

where t is a threshold that is chosen so that no impostors are

accepted (see Figure 7).

to the system and making the system more invariant to

illumination conditions.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors acknowledge the support of Fundao para a
Cincia e Tecnologia (FCT), under project PTDC/EEATEL/098755/2008 (BioSec).
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Figure 7. Genuine and impostor distributions for fused system.

Table 1 shows the performance comparison, in terms of

Equal Error Rate (EER), False Acceptance Rate (FAR) and
False Reject Rate (FRR) when using palm veins only, dorsal
veins only and when a fusion of them is used.
TABLE I. PERFORMANCE COMPARISON

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Approach

EER%

FAR%

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Palm
veins

1.39

1.3889

0.3458

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2.778

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Fused

0.9750

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IV.

CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK

This paper presents a multimodal biometric identification

system that is based on a score level fusion of palm and dorsal
veins distance scores. Experimental results clearly show that
the proposed multimodal system provides very good results
when compared to the corresponding unimodal systems.
Future work will focus on performing more experiments
on a larger database, applying additional/alternative pattern
recognition algorithms, including additional biometrics traits

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of Statistical Independence," IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and
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