Dorsal Hand Vein Image Enhancement Using Fusion of CLAHE and Fuzzy Adaptive Gamma

Abstract

Enhancement of captured hand vein images is essential for a number of purposes, such as accurate biometric identification and ease of medical intravenous access. This paper presents an improved hand vein image enhancement technique based on weighted average fusion of contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) and fuzzy adaptive gamma (FAG). The proposed technique is applied using three stages. Firstly, grey level intensities with CLAHE are locally applied to image pixels for contrast enhancement. Secondly, the grey level intensities are then globally transformed into membership planes and modified with FAG operator for the same purposes. Finally, the resultant images from CLAHE and FAG are fused using improved weighted averaging methods for clearer vein patterns. Then, matched filter with first-order derivative Gaussian (MF-FODG) is employed to segment vein patterns. The proposed technique was tested on self-acquired dorsal hand vein images as well as images from the SUAS databases. The performance of the proposed technique is compared with various other image enhancement techniques based on mean square error (MSE), peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), and structural similarity index measurement (SSIM). The proposed enhancement technique’s impact on the segmentation process has also been evaluated using sensitivity, accuracy, and dice coefficient. The experimental results show that the proposed enhancement technique can significantly enhance the hand vein patterns and improve the detection of dorsal hand veins.

A portable multispectral vein imaging system

“…It can be seen the experimental imaging results of the first person in Fig. 4 PSNR is one of the commonly used metric for the evaluation of any enhanced medical images [23][24][25][26], and DSI is one of the widely used another metric for the evaluation of segmented medical images [27][28][29][30], it was calculated as…”

“…In four studies [23][24][25][26], the MSE and PSNR values of the enhancement methods in each step applied to the image were calculated and shown that the method with the highest PSNR value versus the lowest MSE value is the best method. In our study, as seen in Tab.…”