Finger Vein Recognition via Sparse Reconstruction Error Constrained Low-Rank Representation

Vein pattern-based methods have powerfully promoted the performance of finger vein recognition. However, it is not easy to precisely extract vein patterns from images, especially from low-quality images, and the non-vein area have been proved to be helpful for recognition. This paper proposes to use low-rank representation to extract as much noiseless discriminative information as possible from finger vein images. However, image deformation and image quality variations weaken the correlation of genuine images, and therefore damage the low-rank linear representation. To further deal with this problem, the class labels of training images and the local geometric structure between testing images and training images, reflected by sparse reconstruction errors of testing images, are used as constraints of low-rank coefficients. In particular, vein backbone decomposition based sparse representation is proposed to fast compute the deformation-robust reconstruction errors of each testing image. The reconstruction error on sub-backbones of one training image are used and modified as the constraint of the low-rank coefficient on this training image. We evaluate the proposed method on three widely used finger vein databases, and experimental results show that the proposed method performs well in finger vein recognition.