Combining Enhanced Competitive Code with Compacted ST for 3D Palmprint Recognition

As one of important biometric traits, three dimensional (3D) palmprint has recently drawn considerable research interest in the field of palmprint-based authentication. Because 3D palmprint images have rich depth information and are difficult to be counterfeited. In this paper, a novel enhanced competitive code (Ecomp) is proposed to effectively represent the orientation features of palmprint by emphasizing the significance of the orientation, and a simple and effective compact-surface-type (cST) is used to describe the surface structures of 3D palmprint. The addition and multiplication schemes are respectively proposed to effectively combine the Ecomp and cST maps, and the proposed descriptors can better represent not only the 2D orientation but also the 3D surface shapes of the 3D palmprint. Experimental results on the widely used 3D palmprint database are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on both 3D palmprint verification and identification.