Half-orientation extraction of palmprint features

Orientation features of the palmprint are usually used in palmprint recognitionmethods. Conventional orientation basedmethods are always based on an assumption that the line in a palmprint is straight and possesses only a single dominant orientation. However, a large number of “lines” in a palmprint are curves. The point in these curves usually has two dominant orientations. Moreover, it can be seen that there are numerous cross wrinkles in a palmprint. The cross point of any two cross wrinkles obviously has two different dominant orientations. In this paper, we proposed a simple and effective double half-orientation basedmethod for feature extraction and recognition of the palmprint. In the method, a bank of “half-Gabor” filters are defined for the half-orientation extraction of a palmprint. Compared with the single dominant orientation, the double half-orientations can more precisely characterize the global orientation feature of a palmprint. Extensive experiments are carried out on three different kinds of palmprint databases and the results show that the proposed method achieves a promising performance in both palmprint verification and identification and outperforms other orientation feature based methods. © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.