A histogram-based dominant wavelet domain feature selection algorithm for palm-print recognition

A feature extraction algorithm for palm-print recognition based on two dimensional discrete wavelet transform is proposed in this paper, which efficiently exploits the local spatial variations in a palm-print image. The palm-image is segmented into several spatial modules and a palm-print recognition scheme is developed, which extracts histogram-based dominant wavelet features from each of these local modules. The effect of modularization in terms of the entropy content of the palm-print images has been analyzed. The selection of dominant features for the purpose of recognition not only drastically reduces the feature dimension but also captures precisely the detail variations within the palm-print image. It is shown that, the modularization of the palm-print image enhances the discriminating capabilities of the proposed features and thereby results in high within-class compactness and between-class separability of the extracted features. Different types of Daubechies wavelets (in terms of use of number of vanishing moments, i.e., db1–db10) have been utilized for the purpose of feature extraction and the effect upon the recognition performance has been also investigated. In order to further reduce the feature dimension, a principal component analysis is performed. It is found from our extensive experimentations on different palm-print databases that the performance of the proposed method in terms of recognition accuracy and computational complexity is superior to that of some of the recent methods.