Robust Finger Vein Recognition Based on Deep CNN with Spatial Attention and Bias Field Correction

As one of the biometric information based authentication technologies, finger vein recognition has received increasing attention due to its safety and convenience. However, it is still a challenging task to design an efficient and robust finger vein recognition system because of the low quality of the finger vein images, lack of sufficient number of training samples with image-level annotated information and no pixel-level finger vein texture labels in the public available finger vein databases. In this paper, we propose a novel CNN-based finger vein recognition approach with bias field correction, spatial attention mechanism and a multistage transfer learning strategy to cope with the difficulties mentioned above. In the proposed method, the bias field correction module is to remove the unbalanced bias field of the original images by using a two-dimensional polynomial fitting algorithm, the spatial attention module is to enhance the informative vein texture regions while suppressing the other less informative regions, and the multistage transfer learning strategy is to solve the problem caused by insufficient training for CNN-based model due to lack of labeled training samples in the public finger vein databases. Moreover, several measures, including a label smoothing scheme and data augmentation, are exploited to improve the performance of the proposed method. Extensive experiments have been conducted in the work on three public databases, and the results show that the proposed approach outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods.