Vein patterns are a unique attribute of each individual and can therefore be used as a biometric characteristic. Exploiting the specific near infrared light absorption properties of blood, the vein capture procedure is convenient and allows contact-less sensors. We propose a new chain code based feature encoding method, using spacial and orientation properties of vein patterns. The proposed comparison method has been evaluated in a series of different experiments in single and multi-reference scenarios on different vein image databases. The experiments show a competitive or higher biometric performance compared to a selection of minutiae-based comparison methods and other point-to-point comparison algorithms.