The demand on devices and systems empowered by biometric verification and identification mechanisms has been increasing in recent years as they have become a significant part of our lives. Palm vein biometric is an emerging technology that has drawn considerable attention from researchers and scientists over the last decade. In the present work, a novel feature extraction methodology named GPWLD combing the Gabor features with positional Weber's local descriptor (PWLD) features is proposed. WLD is a highly representative micro-pattern descriptor that performs well against noise and illumination changes in images. However, it lacks the ability to capture the vein pattern features at different orientations. Moreover, its descriptor packs the local information content into a single histogram that does not take the spatial locality of micro-patterns into consideration. To solve these two issues, firstly, the palm vein image is passed through Gabor filter with different orientations to capture the salient rotational features found in the output feature maps. Secondly, the spatiality is achieved by uniformly dividing each feature map into several blocks. Next, Weber's law feature descriptor (WLD) histogram is computed for each block in every feature map. Finally, these histograms are concatenated to compose the final feature vector. Due to the high dimensionality of the final feature vector, Principal component analysis (PCA) algorithm is utilized for feature size reduction. In the classification stage, a deep neural network (DNN) comprising an optimized stacked autoencoder (SAE) with Bayesian optimization and a softmax layer is used. Optimization of the SAE is carried out by using Bayesian optimization to find the optimal SAE structure and the options of the training algorithm. The Experimental results verify the discriminative power of the extracted features and the accuracy of the proposed DNN. For both Identification and verification experiments, the proposed method attains higher identification rate and lower EER than state-of-the-art methods.INDEX TERMS WLD descriptor, Gabor filter, deep neural network, stacked autoencoder, Bayesian optimization.

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