To deal with weak edge, intensity inhomogeneity and low contrast that may appear in finger-vein images, a new segmentation algorithm based on even-symmetric Gabor filter and level set method was proposed. Firstly, the even-symmetric Gabor filter was used to filter the finger-vein image through 8 different orientations; secondly, finger-vein image based on the 8 filtered results was reconstructed to obtain the high quality image with significantly improved gray contrast between target and background; finally, the level set algorithm combining local features and global features was applied to segment finger-vein image. Compared with the level set algorithm proposed by Li, et al. (LI C, HUANG R, DING Z, et al. A variational level set approach to segmentation and bias correction of images with intensity inhomogeneity. MICCAI'08: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention, Part II. Berlin: Springer, 2008: 1083-1091), and Legendre Level Set (L2S) algorithm, the percentage of Area Difference (AD) of the proposed algorithm decreased by 1.116% and 0.370% respectively, and the Relative Difference Degree (RDD) reduced by 1.661% and 1.379% respectively. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve better results compared with traditional level set image segmentation algorithms that only consider local information or global information.