A Feasible 3D Ultrasound Palmprint Recognition System for Secure Access Control Applications

Biometric recognition systems based on 3D palmprint captured with optical technology have been widely investigated in the last decade; however, they can provide information about the external skin surface only. This limit can be overcome by Ultrasound, which allows gaining information on the depth of palm lines and can verify the liveness of the sample, making the recognition systems very hard to fake. In this work, a feasible palmprint recognition system based on 3D ultrasound images is proposed. Unlike previous wet setups, the coupling between probe and human is realized through a gel pad, which permits a comfortable and precise positioning of the hand by the user. Collected 3D images are processed to generate 2D palmprint images at various under-skin depths. 2D features are then extracted from these images, experimenting with different procedures, and are merged to define a 3D template that contains lines’ depth information. Recognition performances were evaluated by performing verification and identification experiments on a home-made database composed of 423 samples from 55 volunteers. An EER rate of 0.36% and an identification accuracy of 100% are obtained. The suitability of the proposed system in secure access control applications is finally discussed.