Finger vein recognition is a biometric technique which identifies individuals using their unique finger vein patterns. It is reported to have a high accuracy and rapid processing speed. In addition, it is impossible to steal a vein pattern located inside the finger. We propose a new identification method of finger vascular patterns using a weighted local binary pattern (LBP) and support vector machine (SVM). This research is novel in the following three ways. First, holistic codes are extracted through the LBP method without using a vein detection procedure. This reduces the processing time and the complexities in detecting finger vein patterns. Second, we classify the local areas from which the LBP codes are extracted into three categories based on the SVM classifier: local areas that include a large amount (LA), a medium amount (MA), and a small amount (SA) of vein patterns. Third, different weights are assigned to the extracted LBP code according to the local area type (LA, MA, and SA) from which the LBP codes were extracted. The optimal weights are determined empirically in terms of the accuracy of the finger vein recognition. Experimental results show that our equal error rate (EER) is significantly lower compared to that without the proposed method or using a conventional method.