11K Hands: Gender recognition and biometric identification using a large dataset of hand images

The human hand possesses distinctive features which can reveal gender information. In addition, the hand is considered one of the primary biometric traits used to identify a person. In this work, we propose a large dataset of human hand images with detailed ground-truth information for gender recognition and biometric identification. The proposed dataset comprises of 11,076 hand images (dorsal and palmar sides), from 190 subjects of different ages under the same lighting conditions. Using this dataset, a convolutional neural network (CNN) can be trained effectively for the gender recognition task. Based on this, we design a two-stream CNN to tackle the gender recognition problem. This trained model is then used as a feature extractor to feed a set of support vector machine classifiers for the biometric identification task. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first dataset containing the image of the dorsal side of the hand, captured by a regular digital camera and subsequently considered the first study attempting to use the features extracted from the dorsal side of the hand for gender recognition and biometric identification.