Touch-less palm print biometrics: Novel design and implementation

In this paper, we propose an innovative touch-less palm print recognition system. This project is motivated by the public’s demand for non-invasive and hygienic biometric technology. For various reasons, users are concerned about touching the biometric scanners. Therefore, we propose to use a low-resolution web camera to capture the user’s hand at a distance for recognition. The users do not need to touch any device for their palm print to be acquired. A novel hand tracking and palm print region of interest (ROI) extraction technique are used to track and capture the user’s palm in real-time video stream. The discriminative palm print features are extracted based on a newmethod that applies local binary pattern (LBP) texture descriptor on the palm print directional gradient responses. Experiments show promising result using the proposed method. Performance can be further improved when a modified probabilistic neural network (PNN) is used for feature matching. Verification can be performed in less than one second in the proposed system. 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.