Attention BLSTM-Based Temporal-Spatial Vein Transformer for Multi-View Finger-Vein Recognition

Finger-vein biometrics has recently gained significant attention due to its robust privacy and high security features. Despite notable advancements, most existing methods focus on extracting features from a 2-dimensional (2D) image projected from 3D vein vessels with a single view. However, recognition based on a single view is prone to errors due to variations in finger positioning, especially those caused by finger roll movements, which can degrade recognition performance. To address this challenge, we propose ABLSTM-TSVT, an Attention Bidirectional LSTM-based Temporal-Spatial Vein Transformer for multi-view finger-vein recognition. First, we enhance LSTM with an attention mechanism to create an attention LSTM for extracting temporal features. We further improve this by introducing a local attention module, which learns temporal dependencies between a patch (token) and its adjacent patches across multiple views, integrating it with the attention LSTM to form a temporal attention module. Second, we develop a spatial attention module that captures the spatial dependencies of patches within an image. Finally, merging the temporal and the spatial attention modules, we create our temporal-spatial transformer model, which effectively represents features from multi-view images. Experimental results on two multi-view datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in enhancing identification accuracy and reducing verification errors in vein classifiers.