Dorsal Hand Vein Image Contrast Enhancement Techniques

Abstract

The hand-vein pattern is one of the human biometric signatures that can be used for personal verification. The first task of a verification process using hand-vein patterns is extracting the pattern from an infrared hand vein image. An image of hand vein acquired by near-infrared (NIR) imaging device usually suffers from low contrast and noise due to non-illumination and thickness of the hand skin. This makes subsequent processing such as segmentation difficult. In this paper, a proposed approach is processed to improve the quality of hand vein image. Comparative analysis on a test image using different contrast enhancement algorithms has shown the effectiveness of the proposed method and its limits.