Palm vein recognition using a high dynamic range approach

In this study, the authors propose a novel approach for palm vein recognition relying on high dynamic range (HDR) imaging. Specifically, the authors speculate that the exploitation of multiple-exposure vein images guarantees better recognition performance than a baseline system relying on single-exposure acquisitions. To verify the authors’ assumptions, a multiple-exposure dataset is collected from 86 subjects, with 12 sets of palm vein images captured for each user. Each set is composed of five images, acquired at different exposures, which can be fused to generate a HDR representation of the actual vein pattern. Local binary pattern and local derivative pattern are employed to extract features from single-exposure images, raw HDR images, and tone-mapped HDR images. The obtained experimental results show that significant performance improvement can be achieved when discriminative features are extracted from HDR contents, with respect to the use of single-exposure images.