Efficient joint 2D and 3D palmprint matching with alignment refinement

Palmprint verification is a relatively new but promising personal authentication technique for its high accuracy and fast matching speed. Two dimensional (2D) palmprint recognition has been well studied in the past decade, and recently three dimensional (3D) palmprint recognition techniques were also proposed. The 2D and 3D palmprint data can be captured simultaneously and they provide different and complementary information. 3D palmprint contains the depth information of the palm surface, while 2D palmprint contains plenty of textures. How to efficiently extract and fuse the 2D and 3D palmprint features to improve the recognition performance is a critical issue for practical palmprint systems. In this paper, an efficient joint 2D and 3D palmprint matching scheme is proposed. The principal line features and palm shape features are extracted and used to accurately align the palmprint, and a couple of matching rules are defined to efficiently use the 2D and 3D features for recognition. The experiments on a 2D+3D palmprint database which contains 8000 samples show that the proposed scheme can greatly improve the performance of palmprint verification.