Mask-guided network for finger vein feature extraction and biometric identification

The problems of complex background, low quality of finger vein images, and poor discriminative features have been the bottleneck of feature extraction and finger vein recognition. To this end, we propose a feature extraction algorithm based on the open-set testing protocol. In order to eliminate the interference of irrelevant areas, this paper proposes the idea of segmentation-assisted classification, that is, using the rough mask of the finger vein to constrain the feature learning process so that the network can focus on the vein area and learn greater weight for the vein. Specifically, the feature maps of the shallow layers of the network are first sent to the feature pyramid module to fuse the primary features of different scales, which are then sent to the spatial attention module to obtain the spatial weight map of the image. Based on the results of several classical vein skeleton extraction algorithms, a weighting method is used to obtain a more accurate mask to constrain the learning of the spatial weight map. Finally, a hybrid loss function combining triplet loss and cross-entropy loss is used to reduce the distance between feature vectors of the same categories and increase the distance between feature vectors of different categories in the Euclidean space, thereby improving feature discriminability. Good recognition results were achieved on the three public data sets of SDUMLA, MMCBNU, and FVUSM, and the values of equal error rate (EER) on them are as low as 2.50%, 0.20%, and 0.14%, respectively.