Touch-less palm print biometrics: Novel design and implementation

In this paper, we propose an innovative touch-less palm print recognition system. This project is motivated by the public’s demand for non-invasive and hygienic biometric technology. For various reasons, users are concerned about touching the biometric scanners. Therefore, we propose to use a low-resolution web camera to capture the user’s hand at a distance for recognition. The users do not need to touch any device for their palm print to be acquired. A novel hand tracking and palm print region of interest (ROI) extraction technique are used to track and capture the user’s palm in real-time video stream. The discriminative palm print features are extracted based on a new method that applies local binary pattern (LBP) texture descriptor on the palm print directional gradient responses. Experiments show promising result using the proposed method. Performance can be further improved when a modified probabilistic neural network (PNN) is used for feature matching. Verification can be performed in less than one second in the proposed system.