Biometric Authentication System based on Hand Geometry and Palmprint Features

Abstract

In today’s society, biometric authentication has gained more significance, since it uses physical characteristics of a person for identification. Physical features provide greater security compared to ownership or knowledge based factors. More and more physiological measures prove to be great characteristics for personal authentication. A multimodal biometric authentication system has the advantage of using multiple physical characteristics for authentication achieving greater accuracy. If one modality fails to identify a person with high accuracy, other modalities are employed. However, in these kind of systems, every modality has a different imagery data requirement, which provides multiple captured images for evaluation. The method described in the article uses the same input data for processing multiple physiological features at once. Biometric characteristics used by the system are hand geometry and palmprint features. The imagery data requirement is a high-resolution image of a well-lit hand with dark background. Capturing the image in good sanitary conditions has become an important requirement in the past few years. Advantage of a high-resolution image compared to images captured with dedicated hardware devices like fingerprint or palmprint scanners, is contactless capturing of the image. Another benefit of a high-resolution camera usage is lower cost claims compared to the other systems using dedicated hardware for image capturing.