Finger-vein recognition technology has attracted more and more attention because of its high security and convenience. However, the finger-vein image capturing is affected by various factors, which results that some vein patterns are missed in acquired image. Matching minutiae features in such images ultimately degrades verification performance of the finger-vein recognition system. To overcome this problem, in this paper, a novel finger-vein image restoration approach is proposed to recover the missed patterns based on generative adversarial network (GAN), as the first attempt in this area. Firstly, we employ the segmentation algorithm to extract finger-vein network, which is further subject to thinning operation. Secondly, the resulting thinning image is taken as an input of a GAN model to restore the missed vein patterns. Thirdly, the minutiae points are extracted from restoration finger-vein pattern. Finally, we propose a matching approach for verification. Experimental results show that the proposed method can restore the missed vein pattern and reduce the equal error rate (EER) of the finger-vein verification system. INDEX TERMS Finger-vein recognition, vein restoration, generative adversarial network.