Exploring soft biometric trait with finger vein recognition

Soft biometric trait has been used as ancillary information to enhance the recognition accuracy for face, fingerprint, gait, iris, etc. In this paper, we present a new investigation of soft biometric trait to improve the performance of finger vein recognition. We first propose some extraction criteria of soft biometric trait for comprehensively understanding this kind of ancillary information. And then based on these criteria, the width of phalangeal joint is employed as a novel soft biometric trait, which can be directly extracted from finger vein image. Finally, three frameworks are developed to conduct the combination of the width measurement and finger vein pattern, i.e., the fusion framework, the filter framework and the hybrid framework. We perform rigorous experiments both on the open and self-built finger vein databases, and experimental results illustrate that soft biometric trait can make promising improvement of finger vein recognition performance. & 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.