Recently, the personal identification technologies using vein pattern of back of the hand, palm, and finger have been developed actively because it has the advantage that the vein blood vessel in the body is impossible to damage, make a replication and forge. However, it is difficult to extract clearly the vein region from captured vein images through common image prcessing based region segmentation method, because of the light scattering and non-uniform internal tissue by skin layer and inside layer skeleton, etc. Especially, it takes a long time for processing time and makes a discontinuity of blood vessel just in a image because it has non-uniform illumination due to use a locally different adaptive threshold for the binarization of acquired finger-vein image. To solve this problem, we propose illumination normalization based fast method for extracting the finger-vein region. The proposed method has advantages compared to the previous methods as follows. Firstly, for remove a non-uniform illumination of the captured vein image, we obtain a illumination component of the captured vein image by using a low-pass filter. Secondly, by extracting the finger-vein path using one time binarization of a single threshold selection, we were able to reduce the processing time. Through experimental results, we confirmed that the accuracy of extracting the finger-vein region was increased and the processing time was shortened than prior methods.