Personal Identification Using Minor Knuckle Patterns from Palm Dorsal Surface

Finger or palm dorsal surface is inherently revealed while presenting (slap) fingerprints during border crossings or during day-to-day activities, such as driving, holding arms, signing documents, or playing sports. Finger knuckle patterns are believed to be correlated with the anatomy of fingers that involve complex interaction of finger bones, tissues, and skin, which can be uniquely identify the individuals. This paper investigates the possibility of using lowest finger knuckle patterns formed on joints between the metacarpal and proximal phalanx bones for the automated personal identification. We automatically segment such region of interest from the palm dorsal images and normalize/enhance them to accommodate illumination, scale, and pose variations resulting from the contactless imaging. The normalized knuckle images are investigated for the matching performance using several spatial and spectral domain approaches. We use database of 501 different subjects acquired from the contactless hand imaging to ascertain the performance. This paper also evaluates the possibility of using palm dorsal surface regions, in combination with minor knuckle patterns, and provides finger dorsal image database from 712 different subjects for the performance evaluation. The experimental results presented in this paper are very encouraging and demonstrates the potential of such unexplored minor finger knuckle patterns for the biometrics identification.