Multi Dimensional Hand Geometry Based Biometric Verification and Recognition System

Two-dimensional (2-D) hand-geometry features carry limited discriminatory information and therefore yield moderate performance when utilized for personal identification. This paper focuses on developing an efficient human identification and verification system using Multi Dimensional hand based biometrics for secured access control. This paper investigates a new approach to achieve performance improvement by simultaneously acquiring and combining three-dimensional (3-D) and 2-D Hand Geometry Features from the human hand. In our previous work (Mathivanan et al., 2007), we modeled a Hand based biometric recognition system using the palm side of the hand. In that system, the all the features were extracted from the palm side of the hand. In our previous work (Selvarajan et al., 2007) and some of the earlier works (Zhang et al., 2003; Ender et al., 2006), the palm side of the hand was used. The proposed approach utilizes a 3-D digital camera to simultaneously acquire intensity and range images of the presented hands of the users in a completely contact-free manner. Two new representations that effectively characterize the local finger surface features are extracted from the acquired range images and are matched using the proposed matching metrics. The experimental results suggest that the proposed 3-D hand-geometry features have significant discriminatory information to reliably authenticate individuals. Our experimental results demonstrate that consolidating 3-D and 2-D hand-geometry features results in significantly improved performance that cannot be achieved with the traditional 2-D hand-geometry features alone. Keywords— Contact less hand biometrics, threedimensional (3-D) hand geometry, three-dimensional (3-D), two-dimensional (2-D) hand geometry