A biometric identification system based on eigenpalm and eigenfinger features

This paper presents a multimodal biometric identification system based on the features of the human hand. We describe a new biometric approach to personal identification using eigenfinger and eigenpalm features, with fusion applied at the matching-score level. The identification process can be divided into the following phases: capturing the image; preprocessing; extracting and normalizing the palm and strip-like finger subimages; extracting the eigenpalm and eigenfinger features based on the K-L transform; matching and fusion; and, finally, a decision based on the (k, l)-NN classifier and thresholding. The system was tested on a database of 237 people (1,820 hand images). The experimental results showed the effectiveness of the system in terms of the recognition rate (100 percent), the equal error rate (EER = 0.58 percent), and the total error rate (TER = 0.72 percent).