Improved multiscale local phase quantisation histogram for the recognition of blurred dorsal hand vein images

Vein texture elements in images are sometimes degraded due to centrally symmetric blur, e.g. due to motion of hand or camera not being in focus, which significantly affects recognition systems performance. Multiscale local phase quantisation (MLPQ) can effectively improve system accuracy in the presence of blur by dividing vein images into non-overlapping blocks and extracting multiscale local phase information. However, MLPQ misses some important discriminant information at the intersections of different regions, which leaves room for improving the system performance. In the present work, a multiscale overlapping blocks local phase quantisation (MOLPQ) histogram algorithm is presented to divide the vein image into overlapping blocks and extract multiscale local phase information, which includes the discriminant information lost in MLPQ. MOLPQ is validated via comparison with state-of-the-art recognition algorithms on a normal hand vein database, artificial-blur databases, and a normal-blur database, and the accuracies on the normal hand vein and normal-blur databases are 99.57 and 98.07%, respectively. Additionally, MOLPQ outperforms other methods on all databases in terms of accuracy.