Incorporating user quality for performance improvement in hand identification

Personal authentication using hand images, especially with those acquired from the peg-free imaging, has very high user-acceptance and has invited lot of attention in the literature. This paper investigates a new approach to achieve the performance improvement by incorporating user quality into the matching stage. The proposed method of extracting user quality is based on the confidence of generating reliable matching scores from the user templates. The palmprint and hand-shape images are simultaneously extracted from the hand images and are used to ascertain the performance improvement for the individual trait. The experimental results presented in this paper show significant improvement in the performance while incorporating the proposed method of user quality in the matching stages. This user quality based fusion of two biometric modalities is also investigated and achieves significant improvement in the authentication performance.