Influence of the pegs number and distribution on a biometric device based on hand geometry

This paper research the influence of the pegs number on a hand based biometric device used for verification. Concisely, it presents the results of a study which compare the performance of different biometric devices with no pegs, 2 pegs, 4 pegs and 5 pegs. We have evaluated the four configurations of the biometric device with a database of 150 users collected during 3 months in an access control scenario. The results show that the presence of the pegs increase the hand biometric device performance because the pegs reduce the variability of the finger spread improving the valley between fingers estimation. If we use measures independent of the valley between fingers, the influence of the pegs on the biometric device decreases.