StarLKNet: Star Mixup with Large Kernel Networks for Palm Vein Identification

Abstract: As a representative of a new generation of biometrics, vein identification technology offers a high level of security and convenience.Convolutional neural networks (CNNs), a prominent class of deep learning architectures, have been extensively utilized for vein identification. Since their performance and robustness are limited by small \emph{Effective Receptive Fields} (\emph{e.g.}, 3$\times$3 kernels) and insufficient training samples, however, they are unable to extract global feature representations from vein images effectively. To address these issues, we propose \textbf{StarLKNet}, a large kernel convolution-based palm-vein identification network, with the Mixup approach.Our StarMix learns effectively the distribution of vein features to expand samples. To enable CNNs to capture comprehensive feature representations from palm-vein images, we explored the effect of convolutional kernel size on the performance of palm-vein identification networks and designed LaKNet, a network leveraging large kernel convolution and gating mechanism. In light of the current state of knowledge, this represents an inaugural instance of the deployment of a CNN with large kernels in the domain of vein identification. Extensive experiments were conducted to validate the performance of StarLKNet on two public palm-vein datasets. The results demonstrated that \textbf{StarMix} provided superior augmentation, and \textbf{LakNet} exhibited more stable performance gains compared to mainstream approaches, resulting in the highest identification accuracy and lowest identification error.