SIFT-Flow-Based Virtual Sample Generation for Single-Sample Finger Vein Recognition

Finger vein recognition is considered to be a very promising biometric identification technology due to its excellent recognition performance. However, in the real world, the finger vein recognition system inevitably suffers from the single-sample problem: that is, only one sample is registered per class. In this case, the performance of many classical finger vein recognition algorithms will decline or fail because they cannot learn enough intra-class variations. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose a SIFT-flow-based virtual sample generation (SVSG) method. Specifically, first, on the generic set with multiple registered samples per class, the displacement matrix of each class is obtained using the scale-invariant feature transform flow (SIFT-flow) algorithm. Then, the key displacements of each displacement matrix are extracted to form a variation matrix. After removing noise displacements and redundant displacements, the final global variation matrix is obtained. On the single sample set, multiple virtual samples are generated for the single sample according to the global variation matrix. Experimental results on the public database show that this method can effectively improve the performance of single-sample finger vein recognition.