finger vein data. A practical limitation is the use of two sensors positioned at different body locations, which
complicates the acquisition setup.
Jiang et al.
[9]
proposed Dual-Branch-Net for multilevel fusion of finger vein and inner knuckle print features,
combining convolutional feature representation, transfer learning and a triplet loss on the homologous PolyU
multimodal database, and reported an EER of 0.422 %. The multilevel fusion is effective but increases model
complexity and requires a metric-learning training stage.
Alshardan et al.
[10]
applied several pre-trained CNNs, including ResNet, VGGNet and DenseNet, to the NUPT-FPV
fingerprint–vein dataset and compared early, late and score-level fusion. High identification rates were
reported, but memory consumption and computational requirements were noted as practical drawbacks.
Kyeremeh et al.
[3]
addressed fingerprint and finger vein fusion for border-control scenarios using SIFT
descriptors with FLANN-based matching, preceded by CLAHE enhancement and a descriptor alignment
mechanism. Their work is relevant here because it targets an operational deployment constraint rather than
benchmark accuracy alone, which is also the motivation of the present study.
Hammad et al.
[11]
proposed a cancellable multibiometric finger vein and fingerprint scheme based on non-
negative matrix factorization, addressing template protection - a dimension that is complementary to, and not
covered by, the present framework. Ke et al.
[12]
demonstrated a Vision Transformer with feature decoupling for
finger vein recognition in online payment applications, illustrating the current shift towards transformer
backbones; that direction increases representational power but also inference cost, which is precisely the trade-
off the present work seeks to avoid. Arıcan et al.
[13]
provided a cross-device comparison of classical and deep
finger vein methods and showed that recognition performance degrades appreciably when acquisition
hardware changes, a robustness dimension that is discussed as a limitation in Section 4.11.
Almuwayziri et al.
[14]
published a systematic review with empirical evaluation of deep-learning fusion methods
for fingerprint and vein biometrics. Their evaluation indicates that using pre-trained models for feature
extraction without full fine-tuning can deliver competitive performance while conserving computational
resources, which directly supports the direction taken here.
2.1 Positioning of the present contribution
Because several of the works above also employ pre-trained convolutional networks, it is necessary to state
exactly where the present framework differs rather than to rely on a single line in a comparison table. Four
differences are substantive.
First, the treatment of the backbone. In Daas et al.
[6]
, Alshardan et al.
[10]
and the fine-tuned baselines surveyed
by Almuwayziri et al.,
[14]
the pre-trained network is adapted to the biometric domain, so its weights are
estimated from biometric data. In the present framework the backbones are never touched: the ImageNet
weights used at inference are bit-identical to the published checkpoints, and the entire discriminative burden
is carried by PCA, a 100-tree Random Forest, a K-Nearest Neighbour rule and two attention scalars. This is a
different point on the accuracy–cost curve, not a variation of the same design.
Second, the composition of the descriptor. Works that use pre-trained extractors typically select one backbone,
or ensemble backbones at the decision stage. Here three architecturally distinct backbones - a plain deep stack
(VGG16), a residual network (ResNet50) and a compound-scaled network (EfficientNet-B0) - are combined at
the descriptor level after independent L2 normalization, and the resulting 3,840-dimensional vector is
compressed by a single PCA basis per modality. The composition is symmetric across the two modalities, which
makes the fingerprint and finger vein branches directly comparable.
Third, the fusion semantics. Feature-level concatenation
[6,10]
and Softmax late fusion allow a strong modality to
compensate for a failing one. The present framework deliberately forbids that compensation: the gate requires
both modalities to succeed independently, so a compromised or spoofed channel cannot be masked by the other.
This raises the false rejection rate relative to a compensating rule and is an explicit security-versus-convenience
choice, discussed in Section 3.8.
Fourth, the deployment envelope. None of the reviewed works reports authentication latency, CPU occupancy
and memory footprint on non-accelerated hardware. Because low-resource deployment is the central
motivation of this paper, these quantities are reported in Section 4.5 and are included as a comparison
dimension in Section 4.10.
It should also be noted that the sole reason for reviewing six works in Section 2 and comparing against only two
in the original version of this manuscript has been removed: the comparison in Section 4.10 now includes every
reviewed system for which the corresponding metric is reported under a comparable protocol, including works
whose reported accuracy or EER exceeds that of the proposed framework
3. Proposed methodology
3.1 System overview
The proposed system operates in five stages: image acquisition, modality-specific preprocessing, frozen CNN
feature extraction, dimensionality reduction with attention-based enhancement, and calibrated matching with