A contactless biometric system using multiple hand features

With the advent of modern computing technology, there is increased reliance on biometrics to provide stronger personal authentication. Among the variety of biometric solutions in the market, hand-based system is the oldest, and perhaps the most successful form of biometric technology. This paper describes a contactless hand-based biometric system by using visible and infrared imagery. An acquisition device is developed to capture both color and infrared hand images. We modify an ordinary web camera to capture the hand vein that normally requires specialized infrared sensor. The design is simple and low-cost. No additional installation of special apparatus is required. The device can capture the epidermal and subcutaneous features from the hand simultaneously. In specific, five features namely hand geometry, palm print, palmar knuckle print, palm vein, and finger vein are acquired from the hand for recognition. Rigorous experiments had been performed to testify the robustness of the system.

► Contactless hand biometrics which could acquire five independent features is proposed.
► Relationship between accuracy and correlation among hand modalities is investigated.
► Image quality assessment method is incorporated in fusion scheme.
► Extreme care needs to be taken when different modalities are fused.
► Simple sum fusion rule is sufficient for reasonable cleansed dataset.