Multispectral palm image fusion for accurate contact-free palmprint recognition

In this paper, we propose to improve the verification performance of a contract-free palmprint recognition system by means of feature- level image registration and pixel-level fusion of multi-spectral palm images. Our method involves image acquisition via a dedicated device under contact-free and multi-spectral environment, preprocessing to locate region of interest (ROI) from each individual hand images, feature-level registration to align ROIs from different spectral images in one sequence and fusion to combine images from multiple spectra. The advantages of the proposed method include better hygiene and higher verification performance. Given a database composed of images from 330 hands, two out of four state of the art fusion strategies offer significant performance gain and the best equal error rate (EER) is 0.5%.