Acta Polytechnica Hungarica Vol. 12, No. 6, 2015 – 213 – Hand Vein-based Multimodal Biometric Recognition S. Bharathi 1 , R. Sudhakar 1 , Valentina E Balas 2 1 Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Dr.Mahalingam College of Engineering and Technology, Pollachi -642 003, Tamilnadu, India E-mail: sbharathi@drmcet.ac.in, hod_ece@drmcet.ac.in 2 Department of Automatics and Applied Software, Aurel Vlaicu University of Arad, 77 B-dul Revolutiei, 310130 Arad, Romania E-mail: valentina.balas@uav.ro Abstract: Multi-modal biometric recognition utilizes more than one modality for recognition of a person, when compared to the single modality with the help of enhanced security. The vascular patterns are one of the physiological biometrics and internal feature of the body, hence, it cannot be easily cracked, falsified or spoofed. This paper proposes a novel approach for biometric recognition, using finger vein, palm vein and dorsal vein of the hand. Our proposed method utilizes both the Shearlet transform and Scale-invariant feature transform to extract features from the hand vein images. The extracted features in the form of coefficients are stored in the data base. Then the matching is done between the coefficients of the input test images and the features stored in the data base using distance measure and finally the fusion is carried out using the maximum likelihood ratio technique. This approach was tested on standard data bases of finger vein, palm vein and dorsal vein images of hands. The proposed method provides a maximum accuracy of 94%, with a reduction in false acceptance and false rejection rates, illustrating the efficiency of the technique compared to other current methods. Keywords: hand vein; shearlet transform; scale-invariant feature transform; multi-modal biometric recognition; maximum likelihood-based fusion 1 Introduction Biometrics has many advantages over conventional safety measures such as Non- repudiation, Accuracy, Screening and Security. Nowadays, biometric recognition is a familiar and reliable way to authenticate the identity of a person through physical measurements of unique human characteristics or behavior. A physiological characteristic is a distinctive personal traits, such as fingerprint, palm print, hand vein, iris pattern and many more [1]. Signature, gait and