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

TL;DR

StarLKNet introduces large kernel CNNs combined with Mixup data augmentation to enhance palm vein identification, achieving superior accuracy and robustness over existing methods.

Contribution

This paper presents the first application of large kernel CNNs with Mixup for vein identification, improving global feature extraction and model stability.

Findings

StarMix effectively augments vein data samples.

LakNet achieves higher accuracy and stability.

Large kernels improve global feature representation.

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.