With the increasing needs in security systems, vein recognition is one of the important and reliable solutions of identity security for biometrics-based identification systems. This paper presents a novel, local feature-based vein representation method based on minutiae features from skeleton images of venous networks. These minutiae features include end points and the arc lines between the two end points as measured along the boundary of the region of interest. In addition, we propose a dynamic pattern tree to accelerate matching performance and evaluate the discriminatory power of these feature points for verifying a person's identity. In a comparison with existing verification algorithms, the proposed method achieved the highest accuracy in the lowest tested matching time. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method as a promising approach to vein recognition. Therefore, we propose the dorsal hand vein recognition for the field of biometric authentication with high practicability rate.