Minutiae-Based Weighting Aggregation of Deep Convolutional Features for Vein Recognition

Deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) has achieved an outstanding performance in large-scale image recognition task because of its discriminative feature representation ability, and pre-trained DCNN models trained for one task have also been applied to domains that are different from their original purposes. Inspired by this idea, a novel hand-dorsa vein recognition model is constructed by adopting DCNN pre-trained on a large-scale database as a universal feature descriptor. However, due to the sparse distribution property of vein information, it is difficult to employ pre-trained DCNN model to extract discriminative deep convolutional features. Therefore, to obtain useful and discriminative deep convolutional features, a novel minutiae-based weighting aggregation (MWA) method is proposed. In specific, the proposed global max-pooling of preserving spatial position information is applied on the feature maps of convolutional layer to localize the minutiae of vein information, and then the minutiae feature of vein image is regarded as the mask that is named as minutiae feature mask, to select deep convolutional features that contain minutiae feature information of vein image. The final feature representation is formed by concatenating each selected deep convolutional feature that is generated by each minutiae feature mask. Series rigorous experiments on the lab-made database are conducted to evidence the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed MWA for vein recognition. What's more, an additional experiment with subset of PolyU database illustrates its generalization ability and robustness.