Basic Principles and Trends in Hand Geometry and Hand Shape Biometrics

Abstract

Hand geometry is based on the palm and fingers structure, including width of the fin‐ gers in different places, length of the fingers, thickness of the palm area, etc. Although these measurements are not very distinctive among people, hand geometry can be very useful for identity verification, i.e. personal authentication. Special task is to combine some non-descriptive characteristics in order to achieve better identification results. This techni‐ que is widely accepted and the verification includes simple data processing. Mentioned features make hand geometry an ideal candidate for research and development of new acquisition, preprocessing and verification techniques.