Deformable matching of hand shapes for user verification

We present a method for personal authentication based on deformable matching of hand shapes. Authentication systems are already employed in domains that require some sort of user verification. Unlike previous methods on hand shape based verification, our method aligns the hand shapes before extracting a feature set. We also base the verification decision on the shape distance which is automatically computed during the alignment stage. The shape distance proves to be a more reliable classification criterion than the handcrafted feature sets used by previous systems. Our verification system attained a high level of accuracy: 96.5% genuine accept rate vs. false accept rate. This performance is further improved by learning an enrolment template shape for each user.