Biometric system such as finger, face, iris, ear, voice, DNA etc. is used for personal identification. Authentication based on vein pattern is an approach that uses the vast network of blood vessels that lie underneath a skin on back of the hand. Vein pattern are unique and also difficult to duplicate. In this paper, we present an approach to identify the user using hand vein pattern and knuckle shape extraction from hand vein image. Low cost IR camera imaging has been used to capture the image. The system consists of image acquisition, image pre -processing, feature extraction and matching. The score are generated in two stages for matching: minutiae feature extraction point technique from thinned vein pattern and the calculation of knuckle point perimeter distance from the