Use of geometric features of principal components for indexing a biometric database

Abstract Financial inclusion is the delivery of financial services at affordable cost to sections of disadvantaged and low income segments of society. It has several leakages such as security threats and transaction frauds in the available system. The use of biometrics in the financial inclusion is a near perfect solution to such security threats. Such a biometric system should be fast enough to recognise/identify a subject from a large database. This paper proposes an indexing technique for a biometric database consisting of variable number of features with high dimensions. The technique makes use of geometric properties of principal components of features. Unlike existing indexing techniques, it inserts fewer features into a hash table. It reduces both computational and memory costs significantly. The geometric properties of principal components of features are found to be robust to handle translation and rotation effects. The proposed technique has been tested on palmprint biometric databases viz. PolyU  [25] , CASIA  [26] and IITK which have 7752, 5239 and 549 images respectively. It is found to be more efficient than any other existing indexing techniques.