Evaluation of wavelet transform

preprocessing with deep learning aimed at

palm vein recognition application
Cite as: AIP Conference Proceedings 2193, 050005 (2019); https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5139378
Published Online: 10 December 2019

Meirista Wulandari, Basari, and Dadang Gunawan

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© 2019 Author(s).
 Evaluation of Wavelet Transform Preprocessing with Deep
Learning Aimed at Palm Vein Recognition Application
Meirista Wulandari1,a), Basari1,2,b), Dadang Gunawan1,c)
1
Department of Electrical, Faculty of Engineering, Universitas Indonesia, Kampus UI Depok, West Java, Indonesia,
16424
2
Research Center for Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Universitas Indonesia, Kampus UI Depok,
West Java, Indonesia, 16424

Corresponding author: a)meirista.wulandari@ui.ac.id, b)basyarie@eng.ui.ac.id, c)guna@eng.ui.ac.id

Abstract. There are many medical equipments being used by human as assistance to check some organs inside the body.
The medical modalities are developed to obtain the most effective and efficient in terms of quality and cost. Research about
infrared spectrum as the medical equipment is a highlight among scientists since it can be captured the blood vessel of
humans. Infrared penetrates the human skin and be captured by camera. Vein has a pattern and it can be used as human
identification system. However, the images need enhancement because of low contrast. Wavelet transforms such as Haar
and Daubechies can enhance the quality of vein images. Hence the identification process can be conducted by using deep
learning method. In this paper, we use one of convolutional neural networks (CNN) method called AlexNet structure as
the deep learning method due to its high performance. As for the wavelet transforms, the Haar wavelet, Daubechies 2,
Daubechies 4, and Daubechies 10 are selected for evaluation on palm vein images in the image preprocessing step. As a
result, we found that the accuracy of the wavelet transforms and enhanced palm vein images are more than 92%. The
highest accuracy can be achieved by applying Daubechies 10 wavelet transform with an accuracy of 93.92%±0.98334.

Keywords: palm vein, wavelet, deep learning, recognition

INTRODUCTION
Medical equipments for scanning human body such as CT scan, MRI, X-ray, USG, can perform good quality of
internal organs of human body including tissues or blood vessels [1]. It is important to have a good quality image of
human body however, there is an alternative to get an image of blood vessels with low-cost equipments. There are
many research about infrared spectrum that can penetrate into human skin. Far-infrared and near-infrared spectrum
are able to capture blood vessels of human with each spectrum advantage. Far-infrared spectrum has more advantages
to capture dorsal vein of human than to capture palm vein and wrist vein [2]. It is because camera captures far-infrared
spectrum going through human surface which has higher temperature than other parts of human body. Palm vein and
wrist vein are better captured by using near-infrared spectrum [3]. Near-infrared spectrum covers between 700 nm–
1400 nm [4]. Near-infrared penetrates human skin and absorbed by deoxidized hemoglobin [4]. Therefore, blood
vessel region appears darker than non-blood vessel region on the captured image.
The devices to capture vein images have been widely used for medical treatment, especially for injection treatment.
By using the infrared equipments, medical personnel is greatly assisted to find the vein which is located under the skin
then the injection of drug gets into human body easily [5]. This vein of human has a pattern which can be seen from
the vein capture devices. This pattern of human vein image is very unique, different one to another. This pattern can
be explored as human identification. The vein image can be obtained as the input system to declare whose vein is
belonged to, then the vein information can be saved in database [6]. The vein data refers to the feature that represents
human’s identity.

The 4th Biomedical Engineering’s Recent Progress in Biomaterials, Drugs Development, Health, and Medical Devices
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 As greater the vein data stored in the database, allowing to many optional data to be analyzed from the database.
The data can be structure-based or texture-based data. The structure-based data the stored database is included
parameters such as principle lines, wrinkles and minutiae point. The texture-based data the stored database is included
the whole and palm vein, which are extracted from image/transformation image [7]. The identification can be
performed by comparing the data in the database with the testing data. Some comparison techniques of the data can
be conducted by calculating distance among the data such as template matching [8], histogram intersection [9] and
machine learning [10].
Currently, human’s hand vein is very convenient to be captured, allowing to be familiar for hand vein recognition
by applying machine learning or deep learning. Nowadays, the machine learning method evolves into deep learning
to handle multimodal data [11]. Convolutional neural network (CNN) is one of the most popular deep learning
methods for designing feed-forward and image applications. In fact, CNN method has been widely used for hand’s
vein identification [12,13,14]. Hence, it seems that human identification by using CNN method is very outstanding
and promising method.

RELATED WORKS
Reference [15] presented Daubechies, Haar and Bior wavelet that were applied to the vein images to enhance the
quality of palm vein images. The wavelet transform is assumed to be a proven method for denoising images. After
denoising process then the images are classified by extracting the Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) and classified
based on the distance feature.
Even though the wavelet transform could denoising palm vein images, Gurunathan et al. [16] have investigated the
other enhancement techniques on palm vein images for classifying step. Some techniques include contrast enhancement
method, histogram processing techniques, gaussian low pass filter, and fuzzy rule-based enhancement. The contrast
enhancement method was assumed to be proven method, which could make the vein path clearer seen on the palm vein
images.
Machine learning is now developing into deep learning. In principal, extraction process in deep learning is conducted
by convolutional and pooling process [17]. The deep learning has an advantage that it could handle image with rotation
and scaling. Because deep learning support augmentation image by flipping, rotating and scaling the image. Moreover,
deep learning with CNN method was assumed to be more robust and accurate for identifying image.

THE PROPOSED APPROACH

Generally, palm vein recognition process comprises palm vein image acquisition, image preprocessing, feature
extraction and classification. In this research, the palm vein images are acquired from PUT vein database [18]. There are
50 people, which 50 left hands and 50 right hands. The simulation is conducted for the left hand and the right hand as the
different subject. Therefore, we have 100 subjects with 12 images of each subject can be obtained. The image size is
1280×960 pixels. Preprocessing is required to take the Region of Interest (ROI) area such as gray level image and
binarization. ROI with centroid method is found out to get the center part of the images. The centroid can be obtained by
Equations (1) and (2) as follows [19]:
∑𝑁 𝑁
𝑖=1 ∑𝑗=1 𝑖 𝑓(𝑖,𝑗)
𝑖𝑐 = ∑𝑁 𝑁 (1)
𝑖=1 ∑𝑗=1 𝑓(𝑖,𝑗)

∑𝑁 𝑁
𝑖=1 ∑𝑗=1 𝑗 𝑓(𝑖,𝑗)
𝑗𝑐 = ∑𝑁 𝑁 (2)
𝑖=1 ∑𝑗=1 𝑓(𝑖,𝑗)

where, 𝑖𝑐 and 𝑗𝑐 are the center of image, 𝑓(𝑖, 𝑗) is the input image, i and j is the width and height size of the input
image, respectively. Figure 1 shows the process of getting ROI.

Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT)

Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is a discrete-time framework that implements the orthonormal wavelet
transform [20]. In the wavelet decomposition, there is a single wave, called mother wavelet that determines wavelet
decomposition. It can be thought as bandpass filter. The detailed components of image are produced by high pass filter

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and the approximate component of the image is produced by low pass filter. In general, the approximate components
are used for further steps of identification [15]. There are two properties of wavelet function, those are called scaling
and translating [21]. Equations (3) and (4) show the scaling and translating formula, respectively.

FIGURE 1. Process of ROI (a) Input image from PUT Database [18] (b) Centroid position (ic,jc) of the image (c) Palm vein ROI

𝜙𝑗,𝑘 (𝑡) = 2𝑗/2 𝜙(2𝑗 𝑡 − 𝑘) (3)

𝜓𝑗,𝑘 (𝑡) = 2𝑗/2 𝜓(2𝑗 𝑡 − 𝑘) (4)
where, j is the parameter about dilation or the visibility in frequency and k is the parameter about the position.
Generally, the equation of dilation is shown in Equation (5).
𝜙(𝑡) = ∑𝑛 ℎ𝜙 [𝑛]√2 𝜙(2𝑡 − 𝑛) (5)

where ℎ𝜙 [𝑛] is a discrete low pass filter.

Wavelet function of 𝜓(𝑡) and the relationship with 𝜙(𝑡) is shown in Equation (6):
𝜓(𝑡) = 𝜙(𝑡) = ∑𝑛 ℎ𝜓 [𝑛]√2 𝜙(2𝑡 − 𝑛) (6)
where, the relationship between wavelet coefficient and the discrete low pass filter is shown in Equation (7):
ℎ𝜓 [𝑛] = (−1)𝑛 ℎ𝜙 [1 − 𝑛] (7)
There are two wavelet functions that commonly used, those are Haar wavelet and Daubechies wavelet. Haar mother
wavelet is the most commonly used because it simplicity, while Daubechies needs time to compute [22]. Both Haar
and Daubechies wavelet transforms reduce the dimension of image but keep the original information. Haar wavelet
and Daubechies wavelet are shown in Figure 2.

(a) (b)
FIGURE 2. (a) Haar Wavelet (b) Daubechies Wavelet [22]

Haar Wavelet

Haar wavelet is the first DWT which is found by Alfred Haar, the Hungarian mathematician. The Haar scaling
function is ℎ𝜙 [𝑛] = {1⁄√2 , 1⁄√2} and the wavelet coefficient is ℎ𝜓 [𝑛] = {1⁄√2 , −1⁄√2}.

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 Daubechies Wavelet
Daubechies transform is one of the most potentials of discrete wavelet transform. Daubechies have specialist in
wavelet approximation properties and support the orthonormal wavelets. Daubechies family can be written by dbN.
N is the order of Daubechies. Daubechies families are shown in Figure 3.

(a) (b) (c)

(d) (e) (f)

(g) (h) (i)

FIGURE 3. Daubechies member with N Order (a) db2 (b) db3 (c) db4 (d) db5 (e) db6 (f) db7 (g) db8 (h) db9
(i) db10 [23]

Histogram Equalization
Histogram equalization is a non-linear process for analyzing brightness and contrast in image that is comfort to
human eye. The level of pixel in an image is distributed equally. More pixels are mapped into the darker region and
the brighter intensities become better spread are the aims of histogram equalization [24]. Histogram equalization
formula for normalization is expressed by Equation (8) as follows:
𝑛𝑘
𝑝(𝑟𝑘 ) = for k = 0,1,…,L-1 (8)
𝑛
With 𝑟𝑘 is the k-th gray level and 𝑛𝑘 is the number of pixels in the image having gray level 𝑟𝑘 . When the image is
divided into some sub-regions and the region performs its own histogram equalization, it is called Contrast Limited
Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE). By performing the histogram equalization in sub-regions of image,
allowing the contrast can be adaptively enhanced along the whole region of the image [25].

Convolutional Neural Network

Convolutional neural network (CNN) has its architecture to perform in good accuracy during the recognition
process. It consists of several layers to perform convolutional layers, sub-sampling layers, and fully connected layers.
The first convolutional layer convolves input image with a convolutional kernel that combines among edge detector,
low-pass filter and high-pass filter [13]. The number of kernel is automatically carried out by CNN. Convolutional
and sub-sampling layers are interrelated to extract features from image input. The fully connected layer becomes the
classification process, which is usually performed by backpropagation multilayer perceptron of neural network [26].
AlexNet is one of the most typical structures for recognition. It consists of eight (8) layers with weights, five
convolutional layers and three fully connected layers [17]. Figure 4 shows the architecture of AlexNet based on [27]
that is adopted to palm vein image as input.

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 FIGURE 4. AlexNet Architecture for palm vein recognition

METHODOLOGY
The methodology of this research is shown in Figure 5. Palm vein images of 100 subjects with 12 images from
each subject. The size images are 1280×960 pixels including the background and palm. The next process concerns on
the palm, which the information should be in the center of the palm. To obtain the point of information, we apply
centroid method to find out the ROI of palm. Accordingly, to resolve the image information, the image is then
segmented as the ROI to become 450×450 pixels. The ROI palm vein image is then transformed by applying DWT
and enhanced by using CLAHE to adjust the distribution of histogram. In current research, we use four wavelet
transforms i.e. Haar, db2, db4, and db10, separately. The result of approximation part is enhanced by CLAHE. This
enhancement method is considered to get better quality of images. As a result, the vein part of palm provides darker
visualization than the non-vein part. The CLAHE output will be the input of the AlexNet deep learning structure. The
images’ size is resized to become 227×227 pixels in AlexNet. The result of AlexNet calculation will be used to
evaluate the accuracy score.

FIGURE 5. Block Diagram about Palm Vein Identification Method with DWT and AlexNet

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

As earlier mentioned, there are 100 subjects of palm vein images used in this study and the ROI of the images are
selected for applying the DWT preprocessing before include into the AlexNet deep learning process. Four wavelet
transforms are applied, including Haar wavelet, Daubechies 2 (db2), Daubechies 4 (db4), and Daubechies 10 (db10).
Each DWT preprocessing result is enhanced by applying CLAHE on the image. Figure 6 shows the images after four
different DWT preprocessing is applied and enhanced with the CLAHE.

FIGURE 6. The Results of DWT and CLAHE (a) Haar Wavelet (b) db2 (c) db4 (d) db10
The images result as shown in Figure 6 are inserted into AlexNet deep learning structure. The AlexNet will
calculate the properties of images to identify the palm vein. We apply the comparison between the number of training
data, and the number of validation data by 8:2 with the learning rate is 0.0001. Figure 7 shows the training and
validation process of Haar wavelet and CLAHE preprocessing. It shows that the accuracy of training is about 92.5%
and the calculation process lasts about 27 minutes 37 seconds of training and validation before the validation criterion
is met.

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 FIGURE 7. The result of AlexNet training and validation process with Haar and CLAHE
Figure 8 shows the training and validation process of db2 wavelet and CLAHE preprocessing. It shows that the
accuracy of training is about 93.50%, and it lasts about 26 minutes 40 seconds of training and validation before the
validation criterion is met.

FIGURE 8. The result of AlexNet training and validation process with db2 and CLAHE
Figure 9 shows the training and validation process of db4 wavelet and CLAHE preprocess. It shows that the
accuracy of training is approximately 93.00%, and it lasts 33 minutes 40 seconds of training and validation before the
validation criterion is met.
Figure 10 shows the training and validation process of db10 wavelet and CLAHE preprocess. It shows that the
accuracy of training is about 94.00%, and it lasts about 24 minutes 37 seconds of training and validation before the
validation criterion is met.
Table 1 shows the accuracy as the result of AlexNet. The accuracy is taken from thirty (30) trials of simulation.
The mean accuracy of Haar wavelet is about 92.25%±2.00323. The mean accuracy of db2 is 93.10%±1.32873. The
mean accuracy of db4 is 93.30%±1.48324. The mean accuracy of db10 is 93.92%±0.98334. The highest accuracy is
achieved by using db10 as the wavelet transform. The preprocessing image assists the deep learning to discriminate

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the feature one palm vein image to another. The palm vein images after preprocessing were more prepared to proceed
than images without preprocessing. The raw images are low in contrast and the vein unclearly shown by the images.
After preprocessing, the discriminate features were extracted by convolution layers and fully connected layers. Due
to the limitation of database of palm vein biometrics, the error reached up to 7% at the beginning of recognition
process. The accuracy level and the performance could be improved by modifying the modeling algorithm since the
probabilities of structure deep learning are challenging in deep learning research By using deep learning to recognize
palm vein.

FIGURE 9. The result of AlexNet training and validation process with db4 and CLAHE

FIGURE 10. The result of AlexNet training and validation process with db10 and CLAHE

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 TABLE 1. Accuracy of DWT with AlexNet
DWT Accuracy
Haar 92.25 ± 2.00323
db2 93.10 ± 1.32873
db4 93.30 ± 1.48324
db10 93.92 ± 0.98334

CONCLUSION
We have presented and evaluated the preprocessing methods by using the wavelet transform for image
enhancement of palm vein images. The results showed that the wavelet transforms can be applied as the preprocessing
step before applying to the AlexNet deep learning structure. The Haar wavelet, Daubechies 2, Daubechies 4, and
Daubechies 10 have been evaluated as the image preprocessing of the palm vein images. As the results of palm vein
recognition, the accuracy of the wavelet transforms, and enhanced palm vein images are more than 92%. The highest
accuracy can be achieved by applying Daubechies 10 wavelet transform, where the accuracy is achieved at
93.92%±0.98334.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This publication is supported by Hibah PITTA 2018 number 4300/UN2.R3.1/PPM.00.01/2018 from Universitas
Indonesia.

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