Summary: This paper presents an efficient human verification system based on vein patterns of the hand. A new absorption based technique has been proposed to collect good quality images with the help of a low cost camera and light source. The system automatically detects the region of interest from the image and does the necessary processing to extract various features. Matching technique based on Euclidean Distance has been used for making the decision. It has been tested on a data set of 1750 image samples collected from 341 individuals. The accuracy of the recognition system is found to be 99.26\% with FRR of 0.03\%.