Finger-knuckle-print: A new biometric identifier

This paper presents a new biometric identifier, namely finger-knuckle-print (FKP), for personal identity authentication. First a specific data acquisition device is constructed to capture the FKP images, and then an efficient FKP recognition algorithm is presented to process the acquired data. The local convex direction map of the FKP image is extracted, based on which a coordinate system is defined to align the images and a region of interest (ROI) is cropped for feature extraction. A competitive coding scheme, which uses 2D Gabor filters to extract the image local orientation information, is employed to extract and represent the FKP features. When matching, the angular distance is used to measure the similarity between two competitive code maps. An FKP database was established to examine the performance of the proposed system, and the experimental results demonstrated the efficiency and effectiveness of this new biometric characteristic.