A hand vein authentication system in which the identity of an individual can be readily confirmed upon gripping a handle is proposed. This recognition method incorporates infrared light-emitting diode (LED) onto a door handle and sets a charge-coupled device (CCD) camera on the other side of the hand. It builds on fuzzy c-means clustering and parallel neural networks (NNs); moreover, it is expected to solve the pattern recognition problem in large-scale databases using NNs due to its self-learning and parallel processing capabilities and by effectively incorporating training patterns. The experimental results validate the e±ciency of the proposed algorithm.