Feature-level Fusion of Palm Print and Palm Vein for Person Authentication Based on Entropy Technique

This paper presents a new approach to authenticate individuals using multiple biometric modalities. It deploys palm print and palm vein images for greater accuracy and flexibility. The contactless system uses a multispectral camera to capture the visible and Near Infrared Images (NIR) simultaneously. Subjects are allowed to place their hands freely below the camera. The Region of Interest (ROI) extraction method used is rotation and translational invariant. Different pre-processing techniques are used for noise reduction. We introduce a simple entropy based technique to extract the palm print and palm vein features. The feature level fusion adopted in this system uses least features (only 16). For 100 subject's, distance based matching yields promising recognition rate (GAR) of 99%. In this age of internet technology, e- commerce, net banking and fast transactions, security is of foremost importance. Initially passwords and tokens were used for security but they were faced with problems like ease of forgery as they could be guessed, stolen or forced out of people. Humans use face or voice for recognizing each other. This ability of humans is further exploited to develop a security system based on biometric features of the humans like our palm prints, face, iris, gait, voice etc. Nowadays, personal identification system based on biometric feature is being increasingly used in applications such as public security, access control, banks and so on. The single modality based systems undergo shortcomings such as people having damaged modality and lower accuracy. To overcome these shortcomings, a multimodal system fusing more than one modality can be used which facilitates higher accuracy. Palm prints are being used for recognition in a number of applications. Using palm vein fused with palm print helps in increasing the robustness of the system. Biometric recognition systems based on palm vein patterns are becoming popular as they possess properties like universality, uniqueness, stability, permanence and strong immunity to the forgery. Since the veins lie underneath the skin and are, in most cases, not visible to the naked eye, they provide a strong resistance against forgery. The complex vascular pattern present inside the hand allows the computation of a good set of features that can be used for personal identification. Infrared sensors can be used to capture the pattern of the subject's veins when illuminated by a source of infrared radiation. The veins can be imaged since the deoxidized hemoglobin in veins absorbs light at a wavelength of about 760 nm, which is in the range of NIR band. Therefore, when the palm is illuminated by infrared light, unlike the image seen by the human eye, the deoxidized hemoglobin in the palm vein appears as a dark pattern. (1). The next section presents the brief review of the prior work.