Finger vein recognition is a promising biometric with commercial applications which is explored widely in the recent years. In this paper, a finger vein recognition system is proposed using rotation invariant feature descriptors for matching after enhancing the finger vein images with an interval type-2 fuzzy method. SIFT features are extracted and matched using a matching score based on Euclidian distance. Rotation invariance of the proposed method is verified in the experiment and the results are compared with SURF matching and minutiae matching. It is seen that rotation invariance is verified and the poor quality issues are solved efficiently with the designed system of finger vein recognition during the analysis. The experiments underlines the robustness and reliability of the interval type-2 fuzzy enhancement and SIFT feature matching. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.