This paper presents a new approach to authenticate individuals using hand vein images. The proposed method is fully automated and employs palm dorsal hand vein images acquired from a low-cost, near infrared contactless imaging; the aim of our work. In order to evaluate the system performance, a prototype was designed and a dataset of 34 persons from different ages above 20 and different gender, in each step 10 images per person was acquired at different intervals, 5 images for left hand and 5 images for right hand. The vein detection process consists of an easy to implement a device that takes a snapshot of the subject’s veins under a source of infrared radiation at a specific wavelength. The system is able to detect veins but not arteries due to the specific absorption of infrared radiation in blood vessels. Almost any part of the body could be analyzed in order to extract an image of the vascular pattern but the hand and the fingers are preferred.

hand vein, Otsu, vascular biometrics, infrared, dorsal vein.