A new approach for inner-knuckle-print recognition

ObjectiveThis paper proposed a new approach for inner-knuckle-print (IKP) recognition. In traditional IKP recognition systems, the region of interest (ROI) is extracted from the image of the whole hand and the directions of the fingers being imaged are not restricted. The result maybe incorrect because that the shape and surface of the fingers may vary greatly. Moreover, if the direction of the finger being imaged is not restricted, there may be severe rotation transform between intra-class IKPs. To overcome these drawbacks, we develop a new data acquisition scheme as well as an efficient personal authentication algorithm.MethodsThe new scheme is designed to capture the image of the inner surface of the middle knuckles of the middle and ring fingers. The fingers being imaged are kept horizontal with two pegs, so that the rotation angle between different images obtained from the same hand can be minimized. The new personal authentication algorithm consists of the next four steps. Firstly, two regions of interest (ROI), each of which contains the inner surface of a knuckle, are cropped from the original image. Secondly, line features are extracted from the ROIs based on the combination of Gabor filtering and derivative line detection method. Then, binary line images are matched by using a cross-correlation-based method. Finally, the input data is classified through score level fusion.ResultsTo evaluate the proposed IKP recognition system, a finger image database which includes 2000 images from 100 volunteers is established. The images are captured on two separate occasions, at an interval of around two months. Most of the volunteers are not familiar with the image acquisition process. The experimental results show that the proposed system achieves high recognition rate and it works in real time. Moreover, the proposed line feature extraction method outperforms traditional Gabor filter based line detection method and derivative line detection method in accuracy.ConclusionThe proposed IKP system is robust and accurate. It may promote the application and popularization of IKP recognition.