BIOMETRIC IDENTIFICATION USING PALMPRINT

LOCAL FEATURES

Jose Garca-Hernandez and Roberto Paredes

Instituto Tecnologico de Informatica
Universidad Politecnica de Valencia
Camino de Vera s/n, 46022 Valencia (Spain)
{jgarcia,rparedes}@iti.upv.es
ABSTRACT
In the networked society there are a great number
of systems that need biometric identication, so it
has become an important issue in our days. This
identication can be based on palmprint features.
In this work we present a biometric identication
system based on palmprint local features. For this
purpose, we have compared the error rate (ER) of
3 dierent preprocessing methods.
1 INTRODUCTION
The biometric automatic identication has become
an important issue in our days. Classical identi-
cation can be divided into two categories: token-
based (physical key, cards, etc) and password-
based. However, these classical methods have a
great number of problems and can be easily bro-
ken because tokens and passwords can be forgot-
ten or stolen. Front them, the identication meth-
ods based on biometric features are rising nowa-
days. Biometrics oers an eective approach to
identify subjects because it is concerned with the
unique, reliable and stable personal physiological
features. These features can be: iris [2], nger-
prints [5, 17, 15], palmprints [18, 3, 19], hand ge-
ometry [6], faces [10, 11, 13], voice [14], etc
Local features with nearest neighbor search and
direct voting obtains excellent results for various
image classication tasks [13, 14, 7] and has shown
good performance in dierent biometrics systems.
Face recognition [13] and speaker recognition [14]
have been carried out in the past using local fea-
tures.

Work supported by the Agencia Valenciana de Ciencia

y Tecnologa (AVCiT) under grant GRUPOS03/031 and
the Spanish Project DPI2004-08279-C02-02
This paper shows a biometric palmprint identi-
cation based on palmprint local features. While in
section 2 we present the used approach, in section 3
we present the used data and the experiments. In
section 4, nally, we present our conclusions.
2 PROPOSED APPROACH
2.1 Image preprocessing
In our approach, we have considered 3 dierent
preprocessing methods: local equalisation, global
equalisation or no equalisation (that is, leave un-
changed the image). The used equalisation method
is called histogram equalisation. In this method
the result is obtained using the cumulative density
function of the image as a transfer function. The
result of this process is that the histogram becomes
approximately constant for all gray values. For a
given image of size M N with G gray levels and
cumulative histogram H(g) this transfer function is
given in equation 1.
T(g) =
G 1
MN
H(g) (1)
While global equalisation is the application of
the histogram equalisation presented above in the
whole image, local equalisation is the same method
but applied locally. By applied locally means the
following. We crop the image, starting in the
upper-left corner, with a window of size v, such
as v w. The histogram equalisation function is
applied to the cropped image. This process is re-
peated by moving the crop all over the image and
for each one applying the equalisation. In gure 1
examples of both equalisations are shown.
2.2 Local Features extraction
Local features extraction technique represents each
image by many feature vectors belonging to dier-
Figure 1: Equalisation example. From left to
right: original image, global equalisation image and
local equalisation image.
ent regions of the image. Once the image is pre-
processed we select the n pixels with higher infor-
mation content. For this purpose we have chosen
a simple and fast method: the local variance in a
small window is measured for each pixel and the n
pixels with a greater variance are selected. In our
case, these windows have a xed size of 5 5.
For each of the selected pixels, a w
2
-dimensional
vector of grey values is rst obtained in the pre-
processed image by application of a w w window
around it. The dimension of the resulting vectors is
then reduced from w
2
to 30 using Principal Com-
ponent Analysis (PCA), thus obtaining a compact
local representation of a region of the image. We
have reduced the dimension to 30 using PCA due
to that value gave us the best performance in most
classication tasks in the past. This is illustrated
in gure 2.
Figure 2: Feature extraction process.
2.3 Classication through a k-NN
based Voting Scheme
In a classical classier, each object is represented
by a feature vector, and a discrimination rule is
applied to classify a test vector that also represents
one object. As discussed above, local representa-
tion, however, implies that each image is scanned
to compute many feature vectors. Each of them
could be classied into a dierent class, and there-
fore a decision scheme is required to nally decide
a single class for a test image.
Let Y be a test image. Following the conven-
tional probabilistic framework, Y can be optimally
classied in a class c having the maximum pos-
terior probability among C classes. By applying
the feature extraction process described in the pre-
vious section to Y , a set of m
Y
feature vectors,
{y
1
, . . . , y
m
Y
} is obtained. An approximation to
P(c
j
|Y ) can be obtained using the so called sum
rule and then, the expression of c becomes:
c = arg max
1jC
m
Y

i=1
P(c
j
|y
i
) (2)
In our case, posterior probabilities are directly
estimated by k-Nearest Neighbours. Let k
ij
the
number of neighbours of y
i
belonging to class c
j
.
Using this estimate in (2), our classication rule
becomes:
c = arg max
1jC
m
Y

i=1
k
ij
(3)
That is, a class c with the largest number of
votes accumulated over all the vectors belong-
ing to the test image is selected. This justies why
techniques of this type are often referred to as vot-
ing schemes.
2.4 Ecient approximate search of
matching feature vectors
An important feature of a practical palmprint
recognition method is speed. The preprocessing
and feature extraction steps described in section 2.1
and 2.2 respectively, have been carefully chosen to
be simple and fast, but the retrieval of a large num-
ber of high-dimensional vectors for each test image
and the search of the k-NN among a huge pool of
vectors obtained from the reference images seems
an intractable issue. A large reference set is essen-
tial for the proposed method to be eective. There-
fore, a fast search algorithm has to be applied to
perform the complete process in a reasonable time.
To this end, we have adopted the well known kd-
tree data structure.
If a guaranteed exact solution is not needed, as
can be assumed in our case, the backtracking pro-
cess associated to the exact kd-tree search can be
aborted as soon as a certain criterion is met by the
current best solution. In [4], the concept of (1 +)-
approximate nearest neighbour query is introduced.
A point p is a (1 + )-approximate nearest neigh-
bour of q if the distance from p to q is less than 1+
times the distance from p to its nearest neighbour.
This concept has been used here to obtain an e-
cient approximate search that can easily cope with
very large sets of reference vectors.
3 EXPERIMENTS
In this work we have used the PolyU Palmprint
Database, created by the Biometric Research Cen-
ter of Hong Kong [1]. This database contains
600 grayscale palmprint images from 100 dierent
palms. There are 6 images for each palmprint and
we have selected 3 images for training and 3 for test-
ing. So, both training and testing sets contain 300
palmprint images from 100 dierent subjects, 3 im-
ages from each one. The database is more detailed
in [1] and a bigger version is used and described
in [19].
Figure 3: Examples of images and its correspond-
ing selection (they are not in the same scale).
The images are correctly placed and neither ro-
tation nor scaling normalization are needed. On
the other hand, the here proposed local features
approach is invariant to translations. The position
of the local features is not stored and then, this
position is not used anyway to consider the nearest
neighbor of a local feature.
Despite other works [8, 9], where geometrical
hand features are also used, we only use the palm-
print features. Original database images are 384
284 sized. After reducing the size to its half, we
select an area of 75 75 pixels. The selected area
center is the mass center of the whole hand image,
excluding ngers. By this way, we select the palm-
print image area with more information. We only
work with this selected area and the preprocess-
ing approaches are applied only to this region of
interest. Two examples of original images and its
corresponding selections are shown in gure 3.
In experiments we have compared the error rate
obtained by each of the 3 preprocessing methods
showed in section 2.1. In all cases we have ex-
tracted local features from preprocessed images as
it is shown in section 2.2 and we have used the vot-
ing scheme showed in section 2.3. We have varied
30
35
40
45
50
55
60
100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450 500
E
r
r
o
r

r
a
t
e

(
%
)
Number of selected local features (n)
w=11
w=15
w=19
Figure 4: Results with no Equalisation preprocess-
ing.
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450 500
E
r
r
o
r

r
a
t
e

(
%
)
Number of selected local features (n)
w=11
w=15
w=19
Figure 5: Results with Global Equalisation pre-
processing.
dierent parameters values: the local feature win-
dow size (w), the number of local features extracted
for each image (n) and in the case of local equali-
sation also the crop window size (v). However, for
clarify, in this work we only shown the best results.
They are shown in gures 4, 5 and 6. In case of
local equalisation, those results are obtained with
v = 9.
As can be seen in gures 4, 5 and 6, in all cases a
greater number of extracted local features (n) im-
proves the classication accuracy. Regarding to the
local feature window sizes (w), while for no equal-
isation and global equalisation there is not a sig-
nicant accuracy improvement, for the local equal-
isation method this parameter has an important
inuence on the error rate. The best results are
obtained when local equalisation is used, more con-
cretely a 0 % error rate is achieved for local equal-
isation with w = 19 and n = 300.
4 CONCLUSIONS
A system for palmprint recognition using local fea-
tures has been presented. For this purpose we have
used local features and we have compared 3 dif-
ferent preprocessing methods. The results for local
0
1
2
3
4
5
100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450 500
E
r
r
o
r

r
a
t
e

(
%
)
Number of selected local features (n)
w=11
w=15
w=19
Figure 6: Results with Local Equalisation prepro-
cessing.
equalisation are the best. On the other hand, in fu-
ture works we will report our system performance
by means of verication rates instead of classica-
tion rates.
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