A study of the shape of the phalangeal joint in finger vein images

Not only can the position of the phalangeal joint improve finger vein recognition. By drawing the segments of the joint by hand, it was found that the shape of the joint holds identity information. A couple of methods to segment the joint were explored, namely watershed, level sets and optimal paths. Watershed and level sets were both sensitive to the veins in the image, watershed more so than level sets. Both of these were also very sensitive to lighting irregularities at the edge of the finger. The implementation of optimal paths was very simple, but already more robust than both watershed and level sets. For future studies a new method that improves upon the optimal path implementation is proposed.