Sharpness Enhancement of Finger-Vein Image Based on Modified Un-sharp Mask with Log-Gabor Filter

Finger vein biometric trait has been increasingly used for personal verification or identification in security applications. Normally, the sample image of finger vein is captured under uneven illumination due to geometry variation of finger and it is usually in low contrast condition which will affect the extracted pattern of the vein. In order to have a reliable vein pattern extraction, the contrast and sharpness enhancement of finger image is executed before the pattern extraction procedure. Un-sharp Mask technique has been considered as one of good tools for the sharpness and contrast enhancement of images. However, it suffers with two drawbacks for our intended purpose which are halo effect appears around the finger image and over enhancement of noise to the vein image. Due to this problem, this paper proposes a Modified Un-sharp Mask (MUM) with Log-Gabor filter method to enhance the sharpness and contrast of finger vein image. In this study, the Modified Repeated Line Tracking (MRLT) algorithm is then used to extract the features from the enhanced vein pattern. The experimental results show that the extracted pattern of finger vein contains more details of vein and detection of small details of finger vascular is facilitated after applying the proposed finger vein enhancement method.