A Comparison of Feature Normalization Techniques for Pca-based Palmprint Recognition

Computing user templates (or models) for biometric authentication systems is one of the most crucial steps towards efficient and accurate biometric recognition. The constructed templates should encode user specific information extracted from a sample of a given biometric modality, such as, for example, palmprints, and exhibit a sufficient level of dissimilarity with other templates stored in the systems database. Clearly, the characteristics of the user templates depend on the approach employed for the extraction of biometric features, as well as on the procedure used to normalize the extracted feature vectors. While feature-extraction methods are a well studied topic, for which a vast amount of comparative studies can be found in the literature, normalization techniques lack such studies and are only briefly mentioned in most cases. In this paper we, therefore, apply several normalization techniques to feature vectors extracted from palmprint images by means of principal component analysis (PCA) and perform a comparative analysis on the results. We show that the choice of an appropriate normalization technique greatly influences the performance of the palmprint-based authentication system and can result in error rate reductions of more than 30%.