APPLICATION OF MORPHOLOGICAL IMAGE PROCESSING TO REMOVE HAIR NOISES WHILE ENHANCING PATTERNS OF NEAR-INFRARED HUMAN VEIN IMAGES

Recently, the innovative vein finder system has been studied extensively and has many practical uses in healthcare and security. Developing a better vein finder system often relies on image processing procedures which help to enhance the vein images. Conventional image processing procedures as median filtering and adaptive histogram equalization have shown benefit in enhancing vein patterns. However, in some cases when there are hairs present in the images, most of these procedures are less effective in removing noises from hairs. In this work, we present a new approach employed additional morphological image processing procedures to efficiently remove hair noises. We have successfully constructed a vein finder device to acquire vein images and demonstrate the advantage of our approach. Effects of the size and shape of the structural element in different morphological image processing steps were studied and optimized to achieve the best enhancement effect. Our approach can be applied widely to other vein finder systems and enhance vein images from various parts of the human body.