Feature band selection for multispectral palmprint recognition

Palmprint is a unique and reliable biometric characteristic with high usability. Many palmprint recognition algorithms and systems have been successfully developed in the past decades. Most of the previous works use the white light sources for illumination. Recently, it has been attracting much research attention on developing new biometric systems with both high accuracy and high anti-spoof capability. Multispectral palmprint imaging and recognition can be a potential solution to such systems because it can acquire more discriminative information for personal identity recognition. One crucial step in developing such systems is how to determine the minimal number of spectral bands and select the most representative bands to build the multispectral imaging system. This paper presents preliminary studies on feature band selection by analyzing hyperspectral palmprint data (420nm-1100nm). Our experiments showed that 2 spectral bands at 700nm and 960nm could provide most discriminate information of palmprint. This finding could be used as the guidance for designing multispectral palmprint systems in the future.