Advanced Image Quality Assessment for Hand- and Finger-Vein Biometrics

Abstract

Natural scene statistics commonly used in nonreference image quality measures and a proposed deep-learning (DL)–based quality assessment approach are suggested as biometric quality indicators for vasculature images. While NIQE (natural image quality evaluator) and BRISQUE (blind/referenceless image spatial quality evaluator) if trained in common images with usual distortions do not work well for assessing vasculature pattern samples’ quality, their variants being trained on high- and low-quality vasculature sample data behave as expected from a biometric quality estimator in most cases (deviations from the overall trend occur for certain datasets or feature extraction methods). A DL-based quality metric is proposed in this work and designed to be capable of assigning the correct quality class to the vasculature pattern samples in most cases, independent of finger or hand vein patterns being assessed. The experiments, evaluating NIQE, BRISQUE, and the newly proposed DL quality metrics, were conducted on a total of 13 publicly available finger and hand vein datasets and involve three distinct template representations (two of them especially designed for vascular biometrics). The proposed (trained) quality measure(s) are compared to several classical quality metrics, with their achieved results underlining their promising behavior.