A novel 3-D palmprint acquisition system

Palmprints have been widely studied for personal authentication because they are highly accurate and incur low costs. Most of the previous work has focused on two-dimensional (2-D) palmprint identification. However, the inner surfaces of palms contain not only texture information but also shape information. Unfortunately, 2-D palmprint systems lose the shape information when capturing palmprint images. Hence, three-dimensional (3-D) information is important for palmprint systems. In this paper, we have designed and developed a novel 3-D palmprint acquisition system based on structured-light imaging technology. The acquisition system can obtain 3-D palmprint information and, at the same time, the corresponding 2-D texture, which are used for personal authentication. A 3-D palmprint database that contains 8000 samples has been established by using the developed acquisition system, and the test results illustrate the effectiveness of our system.