Design of Hand Geometry Based Verification System

Abstract

Biometrics which is used for identification of individuals based on their physical or behavioral characteristics. Biometrics has gained importance in today’s world where information security is essential. Hand geometry, one of the most well-known biometrics, is implemented in many verification systems with various feature extraction methods. Hand geometry based biometric systems are gaining acceptance in low to medium security applications. Hand biometrics is extensively used for personal authentication. The proposed system is a verification system which utilizes some hand geometry features for user authentication. The feature vector used in this proposed system consists of only those features which can not vary with small variation of palm position. Users can place their hands freely without the need for pegs to fix the hand placement. Most of the currently available systems for hand geometry use pegs for fixing the placement of the palm on the scanner. The proposed system aims to eliminate this constraint by allowing the user to vary the positioning of the palm on the scanner. Hence the proposed system is a restriction free verification system which utilizes these hand geometry features for user authentication. It consists of a database where all the information about the authenticated users is stored. The system extracts the features from a test image and compares it with the stored information on the database. The experimental results show that the proposed system has an encouraging performance. The false acceptance rate and false rejection rate are reduced down to 0.02 and 0.072, respectively. The system is implemented using MATLAB.