A Novel Pre-processing Technique for DCT- domain Palm-print Recognition

In this paper, a novel pre-processing algorithm is introduced to identify the principal lines from a palm-print image and a discrete cosine transform (DCT) domain feature extraction algorithm is then employed for palm-print recognition, which can efficiently capture the spatial variations in the principal lines of a palm-print image. The entire image is segmented into several small spatial modules. The task of feature extraction is carried out in local zones using two dimensional discrete cosine transform (2D-DCT). The proposed dominant DCT-domain feature selection algorithm offers an advantage of very low feature dimension and it is capable of capturing precisely the detail variations within the palm- print image. It is shown that because of the pre-processing step, the discriminating capabilities of the proposed features are enhanced, which results in a very high within-class compactness and between-class separability of the extracted features. From our extensive experimentations on different palm-print databases, it is found that the performance of the proposed method in terms of recognition accuracy and computational complexity is superior to that of some of the recent methods.