2011 IEEE International Conference on Signal and Image Processing Applications (ICSIPA2011)
An Efficient Method for Finger-Knuckle-Print
Recognition Based on Information Fusion
Zahra S. Shariatmadar, Karim Faez
EE Department, Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic)
Tehran, Iran
{Zshariatmadar,kfaez}@aut.ac.ir
Abstract— Information fusion of various biometrics for its
high performance in biometric recognition system, has recently
attracted much attention. So in this paper the information of
biometrics in different aspects is considered. At the first, the
information fusion in single modal is investigated. In this stage,
two different subsets of feature vectors are extracted from each
image and are serially combined. With this work a new vector
with higher dimension is considered as feature vector of each
image. The characteristic biometric used in this paper is Finger-
Knuckle-Print (FKP) which is unique and is recently used for
personal identity authentication. The database used in our
experiment contains the images of four different fingers.
Therefore at the second stage, the information fusion of each
finger at feature level is investigated. In fact, this fusion works as
a kind of multi-modal method with a single biometric
characteristic but multiple units. Poly-U FKP database was used
to examine the performance of the proposed method and the
experimental results proved that combining the features of four
fingers is able to increase the recognition rate compared to that
produced by each finger, separability.
I. INTRODUCTION
Biometrics based methods, which are unique physical or
behavioural characteristics of human being, are effective for
automatically recognizing a person’s identity. Through the
past years, many biometrics characteristics have been
investigated, including fingerprint, face, iris, retina, palmprint,
hand geometry, gate, etc [1]. Recently, it has been found that
the Finger-Knuckle-Print (FKP), which is the texture pattern
produced by bending the finger knuckle, has high capability to
discriminate different individuals. Already, several researches
are done in this field. For example, Woodard and Flynn in [2]
used the 3D range image of hand for extracting the curvature
surface representation of the index, middle and ring fingers. In
[3], Ravikanth et al. used the 2D finger-back surface images
and applied on them some subspace analysis methods for
feature extraction. Although the foregoning methods proved
that the biometrics features in the outer surface of finger are
unique; however they have some disadvantage; for example in
the former work, the proposed method mainly uses the 3D
shape information of finger back surface rather than the
texture information and in the latter work, the subspace
analysis methods may not be able to effectively extract the
distinctive features in finger back surface. In [4], Lin Zhang et
al. developed an online personal recognition system using the
FKP. With their design, the finger knuckle is slightly bent,
when being imaged. Therefore the skin patterns can be clearly
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captured and the unique FKP features can be better exploited.
Finally, in Lin Zhang’s later work [5], they exploit the Gabor
feature and Fourier transform coefficients as local and global
information of each image, respectively. In the two previous
works, researchers could improve significantly the recognition
accuracy in verification mode. In this paper, a FKP
recognition algorithm will be developed in identification
mode. In this mode, the user identity is unknown. On the other
hand, identification involves comparing the acquired
biometric information against the templates corresponding to
all users in the database. After all comparisons, the most
similar template is considered as unknown identity.
Also, it has been reported in literatures that different
feature subsets of each sample, have complementary
information. Therefore a fusion scheme which utilizes various
representations can improve the classification result. On the
other hand, the outputs of various feature extractors can be
integrated to obtain decisions which are more accurate than
the decisions made by any one of the individual feature
representations.
So in this paper, at the first, the extracted features of the
intensity and Gabor images of each FKP are combined. On the
other hand, two different subsets of feature vectors are
extracted from each image and are serially combined. The
experimental results in this stage demonstrate that with this
work, the user identity can be identified with a high
recognition rate. At the next stage, the feature vectors of
different combination of fingers are fused. On the other hand,
the information fusion at feature level is examined. The
experimental results in this stage show that the best
recognition performance can be achieved by combining the
feature vectors of all fingers.
In the rest of this paper, section 2 introduces the detail of
proposed method. Section 3 reports the experimental results of
various implementations. Finally conclusions and future
works are presented in section 4.
II. FKP RECOGNITION
FKP characteristic is similar to any other biometric
characteristic which can be used in two modes: identification
and verification. In this paper we focus into the identification
mode. On the other hand, for specifying the user identity, we
compare the input image with all templates in the database.
The block diagram of identification task is shown in Fig. 1,
using the five main modules of a biometric system, i.e., sensor,
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 2011 IEEE International Conference on Signal and Image Processing Applications (ICSIPA2011)
feature extractor, matcher, decision making and system
database.
In the following, the detail of each above important
components used in our proposed algorithm is explained.
Fig. 1. The five main modules of a biometric system in identification
mode
A. Sensor Module
This module captures the biometric data of an individual.
Fig. 2, shows the outlook of FKP image acquisition device. In
this paper, for various experiments, the Poly-U FKP database
which is collected by this device is used. This database is
intended to be a benchmark and it is available at [6].
Fig. 2. The outlook of the FKP image acquisition device
Since the variations in spatial locations of the fingers may
affect on the final result, it is necessary to construct a local
coordinates system for each FKP image. After making such a
coordinates system, a Region of Interest (ROI) can be cropped
from the original image for feature extraction and matching.
We have used the steps given in [4] for constructing the
coordinates system.
Fig. 3(b) and 3(e) shows two typical extracted ROI images.
In our work, the size of these ROI images has been selected as
110*220 pixels.
Fig. 3. (a) and (d) are two FKP images; (b) and (e) are the ROI images of (a)
and (d) [7].
B. Feature Extraction Module
In this module the acquired data is processed to extract
feature values. In this work we fuse two subsets of feature
vectors for each image, therefore we employ two FKP
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representations, which are, the gray-level intensity and the
Gabor transform of the gray-level intensity.
The main steps of feature extraction in our method are as
follows:
Step1) Dividing each ROI image into 22 segments (the
number of segments has been selected arbitrary), so that each
segment has 1100 pixels. (In fact with this work, we believe
that the feature elements extracted from each segments,
capture the local information contained in each sub image.)
Step2) Computing the Average Absolute Deviation (AAD)
from the means of gray values in individual segments. With
this work, 22 features are obtained for each gray-scale image.
The ADD parameter can be obtained by:
N
∑f
1
AAD j = ( )
j x,y −M j (1)
N
i =1
Where, f j ( x , y ) is the gray level of pixel (x , y ) , M j is the
mean value, and N is the total pixels of each segment j.
Although the features based on statistical properties of images
are likely to degrade with the image quality deterioration [8],
but in this study we claim that these features will be useful for
FKP identification. As noted in section III, the results based
on this simple statistical feature, are well but it is expected
that better accuracies can be achieved with more
discriminative attributes.
Step3) Filtering each ROI image with a bank of Gabor filter in
10 directions and 5 scales ( θ j = j π 10 , j = {0,...,9} ). In fact, in
this part of algorithm, we use a bank of Gabor filters as
feature extractors. The Gabor filters can simultaneously
capture the spatial and frequency uncertainty information [9].
Since these filters can extract the three basic features -
magnitude, phase and orientation- of each image, they have
been widely used for extracting the features. The general form
of this filter which usually used in the literature is defined as
following, [10]:
ω2 2 2 k2
ω −(8k 2 )(4x ′ +y ′ ) i ωx ′ −( 2 )
G(x , y ,ω,θ) = e (e −e ) (2)
2π k
Where x′ = ( x − x0 ) cosθ + ( y − y0 ) sinθ and,
y ′ = − ( x − x0 ) sinθ + ( y − y0 )cosθ , ( x0 , y0 ) is the center of
the function, ω is the radial frequency in radians per unit
length and θ is the orientation of the Gabor functions in
radians. k is defined by k = 2 ln 2 (2δ + 1 / 2δ − 1) , where δ is
the half-amplitude bandwidth of the frequency response. ω
can be determined by ω = k , where σ is the standard
σ
deviation of the Gaussian envelop [7].
But a disadvantage of Gabor filters is that the maximum
bandwidth of them is limited to approximately one octave and
if we want the broad spectral information with maximal
spatial localization, the Gabor filters will not be optimal.
Therefore Field [11] in 1987 proposed the Log-Gabor function
which can be constructed with arbitrary bandwidth and the
bandwidth can be optimized to produce a filter with minimal
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 2011 IEEE International Conference on Signal and Image Processing Applications (ICSIPA2011)

spatial extent. The frequency response of a Log-Gabor filter is The column vector of the projection matrix is composed of
given as: the corresponding eigenvectors of M largest eigenvalues for
−(log( f ))2 the covariance matrix S. In our experiment we adopted 980
f0
G (f ) = exp( ) (3) largest eigenvalues to get their eigenvectors.
2(log(σ ))2 In fact by this method, the subspace composed of the
f0
orthogonal basis vectors, is obtained. Then by mapping the
Where f 0 represents the center frequency, and σ gives the samples into this subspace, we can get the projection
coefficient vectors as the sample feature vectors. Similarly,
bandwidth of the filter. The details of the Log-Gabor filter has mapping the test sample images into this subspace can obtain
been explained in [11]. The visualization of the gray-level the feature vectors of the test samples.
intensity and its log-Gabor transform is shown in Fig. 4. We Since the PCA algorithm does not consider the separability
here choose five scales and ten orientations in Log-Gabor of various classes, we can apply the LDA [12] algorithm on
transform. the PCA weights for optimal separability of feature subspaces.
LDA is a subspace analysis method which searches for a
group of basis vectors, and produces different class samples
having the smallest within-class scatter SW and the largest
between-class scatter S B . S B and SW are defined as follows:
c
Fig. 4. (a) Gray-level intensity (b) Log-Gabor transform of the gray-level
intensity.
SB = ∑N ( μ − μ ) (μ − μ )
i =1
i i i
T
(7)
Step4) Dividing each filtered image into 22 segments and then
computing the AAD parameters of each segment. The 22 c
features obtained from each filtered image are serially
combined. With this work, a new vector with 50*22(1100)
SW = ∑∑ (x
i =1 xk X i
ε
k − μi ) ( xk − μi )T
(8)
features is obtained for each image. (By applying the bank of
Log-Gabor filters into each image, 50 images at different
scales and orientations are obtained for them.) Where xi , s are n -dimensional vectors, μi is the mean
image of class X i , and Ni is the number of samples in class
Step5) Applying the combination of Principle Component
Analysis (PCA) and Linear Discriminate Analysis (LDA) Xi .
algorithm on features obtained by previous step (by applying LDA obtains the optimal W in such a way that the ratio of
these algorithms, 164 most important features are selected). In SB and SW is maximized:
the following, the PCA and LDA algorithms are explained,
briefly. W T S BW
Wopt = argmax (9)
PCA [12] is a standard technique used to reduce the W T SW W
W

dimensionality of original data. By using this method, a group In fact, LDA features are the projection vectors of the
of new orthogonal basis is obtained to indicate the subspace training samples mapped by projection matrix W .
spanned by the training samples. With PCA, the image X is Step6) Combining two sets of feature vectors extracted from
mapped to a low-dimensional space vectors Y as follows: steps 2 and 5 into one vector. (164 + 22 = 186)
The classical method of feature combination is to group
Y =WT X (4) two sets of feature vectors into union-vector (various feature
vectors are serially combined). On the other hand, suppose α
and β are two feature vectors of an arbitrary sample ξ which
Here X ∈ R N , Y ∈ R M ( N  M ) and W indicates the are n and m-dimensional respectively. Therefore the combined
projection matrix. feature vector of ξ is defined γ which is (n + m) dimensional
In this method for N-dimensional vector xi (i = 1, 2,..., n) , [13].
It is noted that when the dimensions of α and β are unequal,
we use the average ( x ) and covariance matrix(S) of samples as
it may be possible that the higher-dimensional one be still
following: more powerful than the lower-dimensional. For this reason,
n
1 we used the weighted combination form which is defined
x=
n ∑x
i =1
i (5) ⎛α ⎞
γ =⎜ ⎟ where the weight θ is called a combination coefficient.
⎝ θβ ⎠
n
1
S=
n ∑( x − x )( x − x )
i =1
i i
T
(6)
Ifn > m and δ=n/m, then θ
and δ2 [13].
value can be selected between δ

In this work we used the following method proposed in

[13] to combine the two feature vectors α and β: (in this paper
the dimension of α and β is 164 and 22, respectively.):

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 2011 IEEE International Conference on Signal and Image Processing Applications (ICSIPA2011)

1 8 6 F ea tu re s

C o m p u tin g th e 2 2 F e atu res

D iv id in g in to 2 2
seg m en ts
A A D p a ram ete r +
o f each seg m en t

D iv id in g each
C o m p u tin g th e
filtered im ag e
G a b o r F ilte rin g A A D p aram eter PC A+LD A
in to 2 2
o f ea ch seg m en t
seg m en ts

Fig 5. The proposed method for feature extraction in a FKP identification system

• Obtaining the unit vectors of α and β by dividing
each vector to their norm.
• Selecting the combination coefficient θ and
⎛α ⎞
combining the unit vectors in the form of γ = ⎜⎜ ⎟⎟ ,
⎝ θβ ⎠
which α and β are the unit vectors of α and β
respectively.
In this work, we implemented our experiments by using
different values of θ , so that the best performance was
2
achieved when θ is selected as n . these curves are the accuracy versus the various ranks.
m2
The block diagram of the above steps is shown in figure 5.
C. Matching Module
In this module, the feature values are compared against
those templates in the database to generate a matching score.
In this work, the Euclidean distance is used for comparing two
feature vectors.
D. Decision-Making Module
This module establishes the user identity. On the other
hand, this module finds the most similar template in database
for each input image. In this paper, the minimum distance
between two images is considered as a similarity score.
E. System Database
In the enrolment mode of each biometric-based
authentication system, a user’s biometric data is acquired
using a biometric reader. The generated templates after
labeling with a user identity are stored in a database and are
used for generating the scores in the matching modules.
III. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
For our identification experiment, a closed-set model was
used. In this model, every subject in the probe set is also in the
gallery set. We used the Poly-U FKP database collected from
165 volunteers, including 125 males and 40 females. Among
them, 143 subject were20–30 years old and the others were
30-50 years old.
These samples were collected in two separate sessions that
in each session, 6 images were provided for each of the left
index, left middle, right index and right middle fingers.
Therefore in total, the database contains 7920 images from
660 different fingers. In our experiment, the images collected
at the first session are selected as the gallery set and images
collected at the second session are the probe set [4]. In this
work, two experiments were conducted in which at first each
finger is evaluated separately, and then the different
combinations of fingers are used for improving the accuracy.
Our results in terms of the recognition rate are represented by
the cumulative match characteristic (CMC) curves for which
A. Experiment 1
The aim of the first experiment is to evaluate the
performance of the proposed algorithm for personal
identification on each type of fingers separately. In other
words, for each type of FKP, the gallery and the probe sets
contain 165 classes and 990(165*6) sample images. Therefore
for each input image, we will have 990 score by comparing
the input image with all of gallery’s templates.
In our experiments we compare our proposed algorithm
with three other methods. These three methods are as follows:
Method 1: In this method, the PCA algorithm is applied to
the entire of each image without dividing them. The reported
result has been obtained when the dimension of each feature
vectors is selected as 980.
Method 2: In this method, the combination of PCA and
LDA algorithm is used. In the other hand, at first the PCA
algorithm is used and then the LDA method is applied on the
PCA weights. Using this method on our data, 164 most
important features are selected.
Method 3: In this method, at first, the bank of Gabor filters
in the stage of feature extraction is used. But the extracted
features have high dimension and it is difficult to evaluate
them. Therefore after the feature extraction, the combination
of PCA and LDA algorithm is used for reducing the
dimension of each vectors and selecting the most important
features. With this work, similar to the previous method, we
will have feature vectors with 164 dimensions.

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 2011 IEEE International Conference on Signal and Image Processing Applications (ICSIPA2011)

100 100

Recognition Rate (%)

Recognition Rate (%)

80 80

60 60

Method 1 40 Method 1
40
Method 2 Method 2
Method 3 Method 3
Proposed Method Proposed Method
20 20
50 100 150 200 50 100 150 200
Rank Rank
(a) (b)

100 100

Recognition Rate (%)

80
Recognition Rate (%)

80

60 60

40 Method 1
40 Method 1
Method 2
Method 2
Method 3
Method 3
Proposed Method
Proposed Method
20 20
50 100 150 200 50 100 150 200
Rank Rank
(c) (d)
Fig 6. CMC curves obtained in experiment 1 for FKPs from (a) left index fingers, (b) left middle fingers, (c) right index fingers and (d) right middle fingers

Fig. 6 shows the CMC curves for different finger type those for one feature vector (Log-Gabor features). On the
generated by four different FKP recognition schemes. From other hand, the information fusion of each FKP can improve
these results it can be observed that our proposed method the recognition rate.
performs better than the three other schemes. The The performance of this experiment for each fingers in
experimental results in terms of Recognition rate at rank 1 are terms of recognition rate at rank 1, is summarized in Table II.
summarized in Table I.
TABLE II
TABLE I Recognition Rates by Comparison Between One and Two Extracted Feature
Recognition Rates Obtained by Methods in Experiment 1 Vectors of any image of each finger.
Propose Gabor Gabor + Gray-
Finger Method Method Metho fingers
d Feature level intensity
type 1 2 d3 Left Index 79.29% 89.90%
method
Left index 23.23% 50.64% 68.48% 89.90% Left Middle 80.71% 88.59%
Left middle 24.14% 47% 67.27% 88.59% Right Index 81.11% 89.49%
Right index 21.11% 51.08% 67.07% 89.49% Right Middle 81.11% 88.48%
Right
24.75% 54.68% 73.94% 88.48% B. Experiment 2
middle
Information fusion of multi-modal biometrics has attracted
Also, for proving that the combination of two vectors of much attention in recent years. So in this section we study the
each image can be better than one feature vector, we evaluate fusion problem in FKP recognition. The three possible levels
our method when one and two feature vectors of each image is of fusion are: (a) fusion at feature extraction level, (b) fusion
extracted. From the summarized results in Table II it can be at the matching score level, (c) fusion at the decision level
seen that by using two feature vectors (Gabor + Gray-Level [14]. In this paper we examined the results of fusion at feature
intensity) of each FKP, the results are well slightly better than level.
Since the features extracted from one finger are
independent of those extracted from the others, we can fuse

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 2011 IEEE International Conference on Signal and Image Processing Applications (ICSIPA2011)

the features of each single finger and then compute the multi-modal biometrics was investigated. On the other hand,
recognition rate. On the other hand, the feature vectors of the features of different combinations of two, three and four
different fingers are serially combined, so that the new vector fingers were fused. In all of the experiments, the Euclidean
with higher dimension is obtained. This work is known the distance is used as a classifier for recognition and in each case
fusion technique at feature level. In this stage we combine the 6 sample images per training class were used. Experimental
features for 2, 3 and 4 fingers by which with the new feature results presented in section III, illustrates the suitability of
vectors will have 372(2*186), 558(3*186) and 744(4*186) proposed method for recognizing each finger separately. In
dimensions, respectively. addition based on the results that were obtained on Poly-U
In fact, the goal of this experiment is to investigate the dataset, we can conclude that the information fusion of
algorithm’s performance when the information from more different fingers at feature level is able to increase the
than finger of a person is fused. In fact in this case, the recognition rates to a higher value compared to that achieved
algorithm works as a kind of multi-modal method with a by each single finger. In this case, the recognition rate
single biometric trait but multiple units. obtained by fusion of four fingers at feature level is 96.56%.
We tested several different combinations of fingers. The We believe that the recognition rate can be improved by using
results of these fusions have been presented in Table III, from the features which are more discriminative.
which it can be observed that by integrating the information In future work we will investigate several methods which
from more fingers, the recognition performance of the may improve the recognition rate:
algorithm could be improved. So that by combining the • Fusion method at matching score and decision
features of four fingers, the best recognition accuracy is level in verification mode
achieved. Also, our method has been compared with three • Combining FKPs features with other biometric
methods mentioned in previous experiment. From the result of characteristics
Table III, it can be observed that our method works better than
other methods. ACKNOWLEDGMENT
From the results of above experiments we can conclude We acknowledge the Hong Kong Polytechnic University
that the FKP recognition systems which use multi-modal (Poly-U) for providing the FKP database; also the authors
biometrics work better than the systems with uni-modal would like to thank Iran Telecommunication Research Center
biometric. (ITRC) for financially supporting this work.
TABLE III
Recognition Rates by Integrating the Features of Different Combinations of REFERENCES
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