Hand geometry analysis by continuous skeletons

Abstract

The paper considers new approach to palm shape analysis that is based on continuous skeletons of binary images. The approach includes polygonal approximation of binary image, skeleton construction for the polygonal approximation and skeleton regularization by pruning. Skeleton of polygonal shape is a locus of centers of maximum inscribed circles. Both internal and external skeletons of palm shape are used for analysis. Segmentation of initial image, palm orientation and structure identification, fingers segmentation and characteristic points detection are performed based on image skeleton. Algorithm of color palm images binarization and computational experiments with large database of such images are described in the paper. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.