Enhancement of captured hand vein images is essential for a number of purposes, such as accurate biometric identification and ease of medical intravenous access. This paper presents an improved hand vein image enhancement technique based on weighted average fusion of contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) and fuzzy adaptive gamma (FAG). The proposed technique is applied using three stages. Firstly, grey level intensities with CLAHE are locally applied to image pixels for contrast enhancement. Secondly, the grey level intensities are then globally transformed into membership planes and modified with FAG operator for the same purposes. Finally, the resultant images from CLAHE and FAG are fused using improved weighted averaging methods for clearer vein patterns. Then, matched filter with first-order derivative Gaussian (MF-FODG) is employed to segment vein patterns. The proposed technique was tested on self-acquired dorsal hand vein images as well as images from the SUAS databases. The performance of the proposed technique is compared with various other image enhancement techniques based on mean square error (MSE), peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), and structural similarity index measurement (SSIM). The proposed enhancement technique’s impact on the segmentation process has also been evaluated using sensitivity, accuracy, and dice coefficient. The experimental results show that the proposed enhancement technique can significantly enhance the hand vein patterns and improve the detection of dorsal hand veins.

Hand vein image segmentation is crucial for diverse applications such as precise biometric identification and facilitating medical intravenous procedures. This paper introduces an enhanced hand vein image segmentation method utilizing deep learning, specifically a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN). The cGAN is trained adversarially and augmented with a modied ecient channel attention (ECA) mechanism module. The efficiency of the proposed technique was evaluated using four hand vein datasets: self-acquired dataset, SUAS, WILCHES, and BOSPHORUS. Performance comparison reveals that the proposed method outperforms alternative approaches, achieving the best results across all datasets with an average sensitivity of 0.8878, average accuracy of 0.9639, and average dice coeffcient of 0.7904 for vein patterns. Our experimental findings demonstrate that the proposed segmentation technique significantly enhances hand vein patterns and improves dorsal hand vein detection accuracy.