A Hierarchical Palmprint Identification Method Using Hand Geometry and
Grayscale Distribution Features
Jie Wu, Zhengding Qiu
Institute of Information Science
Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, 100044, P.R. China
{laurawujie@126.com}
Abstract
Palmprint identification, as an emerging biometric
technique, has been actively researched in recent years.
In existing palmprint identification algorithms, ROI
segmentation is always a must step. This paper
presents a novel hierarchical palmprint identification
method without ROI extraction, which measures hand
geometry and angle values in coarse-level feature
extraction, and calculates unit information entropy of
each subimage to describe grayscale distribution as
the fine-level feature. We utilize the grayscale
distribution variance caused by particular positions of
principle lines, wrinkles and minutiae in primitive
hand images as the palm descriptor instead of
ROI-based features. Experiments were developed on a
database of 990 images from 99 individuals. Accuracy
up to 99.24% has been obtained when using 6 samples
per class for training. A performance comparison
between the proposed method and ROI-based PCA
method was made also.
1.Introduction
The last decade has witnessed a great development
on palmprint based personal identification. As one of
the developing biometric techniques, palmlprint
identification is becoming a popular and convincing
solution for identifying persons’ identity since adult
palmprint is proved to be a unique and stable personal
physiological characteristic.
So far, studies on palmprint identification are
mainly based on ROI district regularly cropped in
preprocessing stage. The usually used ROI-based
features can be generally grouped as follows: texture
features[1,2], transformed space features[3,4],
statistical features[5,6] and subspace features[7].
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However, there are some disadvantages of
ROI-based feature extraction: First, Image quality is
the key ingredient in ROI-based methods. The
blurriness caused by capture device’s not clean enough
or hand’s shaking when images are being captured will
make some texture information unavailable. Second, a
ROI image only takes a small proportion of the
primitive hand image, which will lose some useful and
essential information required in identification. Third,
time taken by ROI extraction will extremely increase
the system processing time(See Table 1).
To avoid these drawbacks, we present a new
hierarchical palmprint identification method here,
using the whole hand image instead of ROI district.
Under normal illumination, hand geometry and some
angle values are extracted in coarse-level stage. Angle
values are adopted as a complement to the geometrical
information provided by line segments. During the
fine-level identification, we attempt to find grayscale
variance caused by different positions of principal
lines, wrinkles and minutiae, while skin colors
contribute much to the grayscale variance also. The
concept of unit information entropy is introduced as
the description of grayscale distribution in this level.
The paper is organized as follows: Section 2
presents the preprocessing algorithm and steps of
coarse-level feature extraction. Section 3 focus on
fine-level feature extraction. Experimental reulsts are
reported in Section 4. Section 5 summarizes this paper.
2.Preprocessing and Coarse-level Feature
Extraction
2.1. Preprocessing
Hand images are captured in an original size of
1792 × 1200 pixels and stored in JPEG mode. Previous
studies always employ rotation and translation to
 primitive images before ROI cropping in this stage
because the position and direction of a hand may vary
from time to time when being captured. We don’t
correct all the samples to the same fixed angle and
space position, but instead manage the adjustment in
fine-level stage detailed in Section 3. Following steps
are executed in our preprocessing:
Transform JPEG images to BMP mode, next crop
primitive images to derive the largest circumscribed
rectangle of the hand. Resize these circumscribed
images to 1/16 size of their original, then we obtain
images whose sizes are distinct between individuals
for the sake of palm size difference caused by size
difference of skeleton. Finally denoise the resized
images with midvalue filter and employ histogram
equlization as image enhancement. The preprocessed
images are grayscaled with both length and width
between 200-300 pixels, according to palm size
diversity that reach to a highest of 1.32 times in our
database and should not be ignored. Figure 1 shows
preprocessing steps and results of the proposed
method and traditional method. For simplicity, Figure
1(a)is not restrictly scaled.
(a)
(b)
Figure 1. (a)Our preprocessing result.
(b)Traditional preprocessing steps and result
2.2. Coarse-level feature extraction
Hand geometry[8,9], including hand width, hand
length, finger width, finger length, has been utilized to
discriminate between individuals. Rigorously, due to
its vulnerability and inconsistency, hand geometry
should not be taken as a distinguished feature alone,
especially in identification, which requires much
higher recognition ability than verification. Although,
considering hand geometry does have its recognition
ability just not enough to identify, we use these
geometrical features to classify only in coarse-level
because the system doesn’t require that precisely in
this stage.
The coarse-level stage can reduce the processing
time in a great degree and is adopted prevalently.
Dai[10] computed the number of principal lines and
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cross points on a palm as coarse-level features, and
categorized all samples into 7 groups. This method
only goes well on a precondition that most samples
have a high quality, which is hard to achieve by reason
of some easily confronted influences such as
illumination, hand speciality or inexpectant movement
when being captured.
In this paper, we measure some line segments and
angle values constructed by these line segments as
coarse-level features. This method remains unaffected
even when the primitive image happens to blur. Line
segments used here involves the lengths of middle
finger and ring finger. Edges of triangles constructed
by lines connected finger valleys are included also.
For convenience, the four finger valleys from thumb to
little finger are named A, B, C, D, respectively. E is
defined as the peak of middle finger, F is the peak of
ring finger. The palm-connected end of middle finger
G and ring finger H are defined as the mid-point of BC
and CD as shown in Figure 2. We pick up line
segments AB, AC, AD, BC, BD, CD and finger
lengths FH, EG as the description of hand geometry.
Angles ğCBD, ğDBA, ğBAC, ğCAD, ğBDA,
ğCDB, ğDCA, ğBCA contained in triangles made
by lines segments mentioned above are seen as a
complement to the traditional geometrical information.
Angle values are calculated through the law of cosine
which is defined as below:
ğCBD=arccos(((BC)2+(BD)2-(CD)2)/2(BC)(BD)) (1)
Rest angle values are calculated in the same way.
E
F
C G
H B
D
A
Figure 2. Coarse-level feature extraction
The result of coarse-level feature extraction is a
16-dimension vector V=[AB, AC, AD, BC, BD, CD,
FH, EG, ğ CBD, ğ DBA, ğ BAC, ğ CAD, ğ
BDA, ğCDB, ğDCA, ğBCA]. Each test sample
generates such a feature vector and matches with
sample templates from totally W training classes in
Euclidean distance. The w (1<w ≤ W/10) nearest
neighbours are found as the coarse-level identification
result. The number of classes that will take part in
fine-level processing is significantly reduced in
coarse-level. The elimination of non-qualified classes
not only limit the matching scope but also lower the
probability of misclassification in fine-level.
3.Fine-level Feature Extraction
 We gainw classes after coarsely identification as the
input of fine-level process. The similarities between a
test sample and the w corresponding classes will be
computed in this period. First, according to the stored
geometrical information, we adjust the test sample to
the same position and direction of the w classes
respectively. Relying on the fact that the grayscale
distribution is identical within the same class and
obvious distinct between classes, we present an
entropy based method to measure the grayscale
distribution as fine-level feature.
For a M × N sized, 256 grayscale digital image A,
f(x,y)(0 ≤ f(x,y) ≤ 255) is the grayscale value of (x,y),
the global information entropy of A is defined as:
M N
H = −¦¦ pij log pij , pij = f (i , j ) / ¦¦ f (m, n) (2)
i =1 j =1
Global entropy describes the global grayscale
statistical characteristic within an image. It only relates
to appearance probability of pixels belong to each
grayscale but not concerns with positions of these
pixels. Different images will share the same global
entropy when they coincidentally have the same
probability of each grayscale. So the global entropy
can’t be adopted as a distinguished feature of images.
In contrary to global entropy, local entropy has the
ability to describe the grayscale distribution of any
given area in an image. Sun[11] combined grid
descriptor(GD) with image information entropy to
describe each GD area’s grayscale distribution. We
continue to use the idea of local entropy in calculating
each subimage’s grayscale distribution as the spatial
information combined feature.
The M × N sized primitive image was divided into
totally K subimages, each of which can be called a unit
with a size of M’ × N’. K is defined as follows:
K = P × Q P = ¬« M / M '¼» Q = ¬« N / N '¼» (3)
Entropy of each unit U st ( s = 1, 2...P , t = 1, 2...Q ) is
define as:
M ' N'
H st = −¦¦ p 'ij log p 'ij
i =1 j =1
M ' N'
p 'ij = f '(i , j ) / ¦¦ f '( m, n)
m =1 n =1
By calculating the corresponding unit information
entropy values of K subimages, we can obtain the unit
entropy matrix of image A as shown in Figure 3.
Rearrange the unit entropy matrix to a vector can
we derive the fine-level feature H=(H11,H12,…,HPQ).
Then measure the similarity between the fine-level
featre vector H from the test sample and H’i(i=1,2…w)
from the corresponding w classes in Eulidean distance.
P ,Q
di = ( ( H mn − H i',mn )2 )1/ 2
¦
m =1, n =1
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The nearest neighbour is found as the system’s final
identification result.
H11 H12 … H1Q
H11 H12 … H1Q
H21 H22 … H2Q
H21 H22 … H2Q
… … …
… … …
HP1 HP2 … HPQ HP1 HP2 … HPQ
Figure 3. Matrix of unit information entropy
4.Experimental Setup and Results
An experimental database was established with
M N hand images captured by our own capture device made
up of a camera kept at a fixed distance from a table
m =1 n =1 without any peg or limitation and connected with a
computer. Under normal daylight illumination without
fiercely change, users were asked to place their right
hands on a flat soft surface with palm side facing
skyward, fingers stretching to the best extent, and no
obvious dirt on hands. Users were also asked to
replace their hands after each capturing, and none of
these users had received any training before. The
database includes 99 individuals aged from 20 to 36 of
both gender, 10 images from each person with the
resolution of 1792 × 1200(pixels) and 8-bit colors. 5
images in 10 of each class were captured at one time,
the rest were captured 2 months later.
4.1. Coarse-level experimental result
The coarse-level identification result is clearly
shown in Figure 4, when training set includes only 1
sample from each class as an example. Figure 4(a) and
(b) shows the results of method only using line
segments as coarse-level features and method with
angle values added as a complement, respectively.
The x-aixs values in the figure are the test sample
index from 1 to 891. To each test sample, we findthe
w nearest neighbours in similarity measurement and
obtain aw sized array with the original w value 50.
(4)
The ith element is the ith nearest neighbour’s class
index. Each y-axis value means what position the class
index of this test sample is in the array. The proposed
method result displayed in Figure 4(b) performs
significantly better then the previously used algorithm
shown in Figure 4(a), which implies the addition of
angle information increase the dispersion between
classes and the convergence within a class. In Figure
4(b), only 10 in 891 samples have a y-axis value
bigger than 8. And there are totally 708 images in 891
with a y-axis value 1, that means only the coarse-level
method can achieve the accuracy high up to 79.46%.
(5)
According to the data analysis, we choose 8 as the
 final w value, which is much smaller than the total (5)Our method is effective for the deficiency of
class number 99. Making thew value ultimately 8 texture legibility in images like in our database since
assures 98.9% of the test samples are correctly color features can make up the lack of texure.
processed in coarse-level, which can reach a highest of
99.5% when using 6 samples per class for training. 5. Conclusion
50 50

45 45

40 40
This paper presents a novel hierarchical method
Coarse-level identification result

Coarse-level identification result

35 35

30

25
30

25
without ROI extraction for analysis of palmprint. In
20 20 coarse-level, the proposed method adds angle value
15 15

10 10 information as a complement to geometrical line

5

0
0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900
5

0
0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900
segments traditionally used in recognition. Then unit
Test sample No. Test sample No.
information entropy is introduced to evaluate the local
(a) (b) grayscale distribution as the fine-level feature. Results
Figure 4. Results of coarse-level classification
are promising with accuracy up to 99.24% when 6
(a) Line segments only (b)Angle information added
samples in 10 of each class were used for training and
93.15% when only 1 sample per class for training.
4.2. Fine-level experimental result
6. References
A performance comparison of our method and
traditional PCA algorithm are made in Table 1, while
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the time consuming. This disadvantage will be
improved in our future research.

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