Assessment of geometric features for individual identification and verification in biometric hand systems

This paper studies the reliability of geometric features for the identification of users based on hand biometrics. Our methodology is based on genetic algorithms and mutual information. The aim is to provide a system for user identification rather than a classification. Additionally, a robust hand segmentation method to extract the hand silhouette and a set of geometric features in hard and complex environments is described. This paper focuses on studying how important and discriminating the hand geometric features are, and if they are suitable in developing a robust and reliable biometric identification. Several public databases have been used to test our method. As a result, the number of required features have been drastically reduced from datasets with more than 400 features. In fact, good classification rates with about 50 features on average are achieved, with a 100% accuracy using the GA–LDA strategy for the GPDS database and 97% for the CASIA and IITD databases, approximately. For these last contact-less databases, reasonable EER rates are also obtained.

► Application of an identification – verification scheme in hand biometrics.
► Robust extraction of hand silhouettes and its features in complex environments.
► Improvement of previous approaches according to the identification accuracy.
► Assessment of the relevance of geometric features in several hand biometry databases.