The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Synthetic Finger-Vein Image Database Generator (Version 1.0)

The finger-vein biometric is not visible with naked eye under normal illumination conditions, which makes it very difficult to covertly acquire and extremely difficult to alter their integrity. Therefore finger-vein biometrics offers high degree of privacy, anonymity, security and anti-spoofing capability over other popular biometrics like face, iris or even fingerprint. Several databases of finger-vein images have recently been introduced in public domain. However, these databases are relatively smaller than those available for face or iris and involve a small number of subjects for imaging. Therefore it is impossible to undertake the developed identification algorithms to extensive testing. The acquisition of large scale biometric databases is expensive and inconvenient for the subjects and comes with the privacy concerns related with biometrics. In order to address some of these problems, several synthetic biometric databases have been developed. However, finger-vein image synthesis had not yet attained the attention of researchers.

This project develops synthesis model for generating finger-vein images. The program is available for public use and can be used to generate large number of synthesized finger-vein images. The technical report describes the details of the method and some preliminary results from synthesized database from 5000 different subjects fingers. The above figure shows the interface for the synthetic finger-vein generator which can be accessed from here.

During the startup of the GUI, the default values are loaded, which can be adjusted thereafter. The GUI can be used primarily for the two purposes: to visualize the influence of the parameter values and to generate a synthetic finger-vein database based on the chosen parameters. When choosing the visualization, the generated vein nodes, the finger-vein pattern and the final finger-vein image, generated based on the lower values of the specified parameters, will be shown for one sample. This mode is the mode in which the GUI is started, after which it first displays default images. When the Generate database box is checked, a synthetic finger-vein database will be generated for the amount of subjects and images specified. The location in which the database will be saved, must be specified in order to start the generation. The images will be saved in that location in a folder GeneratedImages and the images for every subject will be saved in a separate folder. The images are saved in the .tiff format which preserves all the information. The GUI will close automatically after the complete generation of database. The Generate button will start the generation of the sample images or the generation of the database. Using the Reset button, the default values will be loaded again.

June 2014