How to extract the vein pattern from an IR image of finger? I am trying to isolate (or segment to be precise) the vein pattern from Infra red image of a finger (using MATLAB) like shown below:


So my output will be a binary image like (not the exact dimension of image shown):



I tried histogram equalization to make the veins more visible, but it was not that successful. Any help to proceed further would be very helpful.
You might want to also try running a ridge filter on the dataset; something like the frangi filter might work. 

A sample result is 



NB
the white border is due to the border in the image I pulled from this site