Biometrics is the science of identifying a person using physiological or behavioral features. These features range from physical traits like fingerprints, faces, retina etc. to personal behaviors such as signatures. Compared to traditional methods, biometric features are much harder for intruders to copy or forge, and it is very rare for them to be lost. Hence, identification systems making use of biometric features that offer a much more secure and reliable performance. Many biometrics such as face, fingerprint and iris images, have been studied extensively for personal verification purposes in the past few decades. However, verification using vein patterns is less developed compared to other human traits.

This paper presents a hand vein authentication system using near infrared images of hand vein patterns. In order to evaluate the system performance, hand vein patterns from WASETdatabase were used. The database contains hand vein patterns of 100 different persons and of different gender, 5 images per person acquired at different intervals, for right hand. The images are of size 320x240 with a grey scale resolution of 8 bits per pixel. The data set is for normal persons who do not complain from any diseases such as arthritis. In verification testing analysis a single image is used to represent the template and 5 images for testing. Each of the 5 images is matched with a single template.

Unlike most biometric systems that carry out comparisons based on a pre-selected feature set, this proposed system directly recognizes the vein pattern by measuring their Hausdorff Distance. The modification suggested in the proposed matching classifier is found to improve the efficiency of the system. MATLAB tool has been used to realize the vein pattern recognition system.