Personal authentication using multiple palmprint representation

Although several palmprint representations have been proposed for personal authentication, there is little agreement on which palmprint representation can provide best representation for reliable authentication. In this paper, we characterize user’s identity through the simultaneous use of three major palmprint representations and achieve better performance than either one individually. This paper also investigates comparative performance between Gabor, line and appearance based palmprint representations and using their score and decision level fusion. The combination of various representations may not always lead to higher performance as the features from the same image may be correlated. Therefore we also propose product of sum rule which achieves better performance than any other fixed combination rules. Our experimental results on the database of 100 users achieve 34.56% improvement in performance (equal error rate) as compared to the case when features from single palmprint representation are employed. The proposed usage of multiple palmprint representations, especially on the peg-free and non-contact imaging setup, achieves promising results and demonstrates its usefulness. 2005 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.