Mobile Identification by Palmprint Biometrics

Noam Brown (noam.brown@gmail.com)

With the growing amount of personal information stored on mobile devices today, security has become a critical issue. Conventional security methods, such as passwords, face the problem of the user simply forgetting. Biometrics can provide an effective alternative that is not subject to this problem. Unfortunately, common biometric measures such as fingerprint, iris, or face recognition are difficult to use on a mobile device without a front-facing camera. However, recent progress in the processing power and camera quality of mobile devices has made handprint matching a potential option. The goal of this project is to develop a robust method of capturing, filtering, and matching handprint images on a mobile Android device. The application will allow the user to take a reference image of his or her hand. The application will then only unlock in the future if the user takes a picture of the same hand. Ideally, the method will work regardless of hand orientation, lighting conditions, or camera distance. First, the program will use skin detection to determine the boundaries of the hand in the image. It will then adjust for orientation and lighting before using edge and ridge detection algorithms to do feature extraction. Matching will be based on the geometry of the hand, such as finger length and palm width, as well features of the palm, such as line and wrinkle locations. The application will then compare these features to the reference hand. There has been significant research on both palm print and hand geometry biometrics. However, most of these methods require special, non-mobile equipment and precise placement of the subjects hand. It is unclear how effective these methods would be in a mobile environment. There has also been a little research on hand biometrics specifically for mobile devices with promising results, but the effectiveness of these methods outside ideal conditions is still unclear. [1] Y. Han, T. Tan, Z. Sun, Y. Hao, Embedded Palmprint Recognition System on Mobile Devices, International Conference on Biometrics, LNCS 4642, pp. 1184-1193. 2007. [2] Slobodan Ribaric, Ivan Fratric, "A Biometric Identification System Based on Eigenpalm and Eigenfinger Features," IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, vol. 27, no. 11, pp. 1698-1709, Nov. 2005, doi:10.1109/TPAMI.2005.209 [3] Xiangqian Wu, D. Zhang, Kuanquan Wang, Palm line extraction and matching for personal authentication, IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society, vol. 36, no. 5, pp. 978-987,Sep. 2006, doi: 10.1109/TSMCA.2006.871797 [4] Roberts C., Biometric Technologies - Palm and Hand [Online], available: http://www.ccip.govt.nz/newsroom/information-notes/2006/biometrics-technologies-palmhand.pdf, March 22, 2008