Palmprint enhancement using GA-AIVHE method

Palmprint identification is a subcategory of biometrics identification, which can be efficiently used to identify the people. Palmprint-based identification is currently a potential alternative to human identification method of a well known fingerprint-based identification. For example, if the hand of the identified person is dirty, the accuracy of fingerprint-based identification is distorted, while the palmprint-based identification still yields high identification accuracy. In order to achieve high identification accuracy, all components of the scanned palmprint image need to be enhanced, i.e. palmprint lines, textures and hand geometry features. Specifically, each component needs to be enhanced and employed in order to efficiently identify the people. Based on histogram equalization (HE), contrast enhancement scheme named adaptively increasing the value of histogram (AIVHE) can be used as an enhancement technique. In AIVHE method, the enhancement is controlled by two user parameters beta and gamma. Furthermore, AIVHE method enhance the contrast but the brightness of the palmprint is not preserved. In order to enhance the palmprint and preserve the brightness, Genetic Algorithm is used to optimize the value of beta and gamma based on entropy value. The experiments results show that the proposed method do the enhancement and also preserve the brightness. Entropy is used as a fitness function.