Dual-Stream Enhanced Deep Network for Transmission Near-Infrared Dorsal Hand Vein Age Estimation with Attention Mechanisms

Dorsal hand vein recognition, with unique stable and reliable advantages, has attracted considerable attention from numerous researchers. In this case, the dorsal hand vein images captured by the means of transmission infrared imaging are clearer than those collected by other infrared methods, enabling it to be more suitable for the biometric applications. However, less attention is paid to individual age estimation based on dorsal hand veins. To this end, this paper proposes an efficient dorsal hand vein age estimation model using a deep neural network with attention mechanisms. Specifically, a convolutional neural network (CNN) is developed to extract the expressive features for age estimation. Simultaneously, another deep residual network is leveraged to strengthen the representation ability on subtle dorsal vein textures. Moreover, variable activation functions and pooling layers are integrated into the respective streams to enhance the nonlinearity modeling of the dual-stream model. Finally, a dynamic attention mechanism module is embedded into the dual-stream network to achieve multi-modal collaborative enhancement, guiding the model to concentrate on salient age-specific features. To evaluate the performance of dorsal hand vein age estimation, this work collects dorsal hand vein images using the transmission near-infrared spectrum from 300 individuals across various age groups. The experimental results show that the dual-stream enhanced network with the attention mechanism significantly improves the accuracy of dorsal hand vein age estimation in comparison with other deep learning approaches, indicating the potential of using near-infrared dorsal hand vein imaging and deep learning technology for efficient human age estimation.