Hand geometry: a new approach for feature extraction

This work presents a complete control access system based on the hand geometry, a hardware key and a vital sign detector. The circuitry reads the hardware key and the heartbeat in order to confirm the identity of the author given by the analysis of the hand image. The presented system distinguish itself from other similar biometric systems mainly because of the feature extraction process which is based on the analysis of the curvature profile of the image, making the system invariant to the rotation and translation of the hand. This makes unnecessary the use of any kind of restriction devices such as pins or pegs to position the hand. FAR rates as low as 0.8% were obtained by the use of simple weighted geometric features on a database of more than 360 hand images.