Are infrared images reliable for palmprint based personal identification systems?

Several studies for palmprint-based person identification have focused on the use of palmprint images captured in the visible part of the spectrum. However, to a possible improvement of the existing palmprint systems, the proposed work concerned with the use of infrared palmprint images for the palmprint identification system. For that, a comparison of infrared palmprint images versus gray level and color image is given. At the features-extraction stage the features are generated by the method of Principal Component Analysis (PCA). This feature-extraction technique has been widely used for pattern recognition, as well as in the field of biometrics. The proposed scheme is tested and evaluated using PolyU multispectral palmprint database of 400 users. Our experimental results show that the infrared spectrum achieves the best result. Also, color image present three spectrums, for that, we propose a score level and image level fusion schemes to integrate these colors information.