Recently, biometric techniques such as face recognition, finger-print recognition and iris recognition have been widely applied for various applications including door access control, finance security and electric passport. This paper presents the method of using finger-vein pattern for the personal identification. In general, when the finger-vein image is acquired from the camera, various conditions such as the penetrating amount of the infrared light and the camera noise make the segmentation of the vein from the background difficult. This in turn affects the system performance of personal identification. To solve this problem, we propose the novel and fast method for extracting the finger-vein region. The proposed method has two advantages compared to the previous methods. One is that we adopt a locally adaptive thresholding method for the binarization of acquired finger-vein image. Another advantage is that the simple morphological opening and closing are used to remove the segmentation noise to finally obtain the finger-vein region from the skeletonization. Experimental results showed that our proposed method could quickly and exactly extract the finger-vein region without using various kinds of time-consuming filters for preprocessing.