Vein Enhancement Using a Dark Diffusion Prior

Vein recognition is emerging as a good alternative to the high-level biometric authentication due to its robustness against forgery. However, the poor quality of the vein image still poses a great difficulty to the extension of its usability. In this letter, we propose a novel method for vein enhancement based on a dark diffusion prior. The key idea of the proposed method is to reveal the characteristics of veins, which absorbs the near infrared well compared to background, by exploring multiple diffusion spaces. In contrast to previous approaches, the proposed method does not yield the blurring effect while efficiently suppressing unwanted noise. Experimental results on the benchmark database show that the proposed method is effective for vein recognition compared to other enhancement schemes introduced in the literature.