Biometric authentication using finger nail surface

This paper presents a new biometric system based on the outer surface of the finger nail. There has not been any attempt in utilizing nail shape and texture for human authentication. The nail bed information, imitated on the nail surface proves to be a very unique and stable biometric identifier for personal authentication. However, research literature presents some complex set-up and the use of interferometer technique for extraction of nail bed details. In this work we propose a very simple and convenient method to segment nail surface from the user hand and use it as a biometric identifier. We further extract texture feature from nail-surface and our experimental results from 180 users validate the contributions from this paper.