The invention provides a method for extracting, matching and recognizing characteristics of finger veins, which comprises the following steps: acquiring a finger vein image by an infrared image acquiring device, preprocessing the image, extracting the characteristics, recognizing and analyzing, wherein the preprocessing step comprises the concrete steps of graying a color image, extracting a finger area, adopting direction filtering and enhancing, extracting a finger vein grain according to a finger outline mark and binarizing, de-noising by an area eliminating method, and standardizing the image size to a uniform image size; the characteristic extracting method comprises the steps of carrying out sub-block partitioning on the finger vein grain image, and extracting the characteristics ofeach sub-block image by a bidirectional two-dimensional principal component analysis method of bidirectional characteristic value weighting partitioning; and the recognizing and analyzing step recognizes the characteristics of each sub-block as a whole by a nearest neighbor sorter. The invention can reduce the calculated amount of a high dimensional image matrix in recognition of the finger veins, can obviously improve the recognition speed of the finger vein, and the recognition rate is stable and high.