A wavelet-based dominant feature extraction algorithm for palm-print recognition

Abstract

In this paper, a multi-resolution feature extraction algorithm for palm-print recognition is proposed based on two-dimensional discrete wavelet transform (2D-DWT), which efficiently exploits the local spatial variations in a palm-print image. The entire image is segmented into several small spatial modules and the effect of modularization in terms of the entropy content of the palm-print images has been investigated. A palm-print recognition scheme is developed based on extracting dominant wavelet features from each of these local modules. In the selection of the dominant features, a threshold criterion is proposed, which not only drastically reduces the feature dimension but also captures precisely the detail variations within the palm-print image. It is shown that, because of modularization of the palm-print image, the discriminating capabilities of the proposed features are enhanced, which results in a very high within-class compactness and between-class separability of the extracted features. The effect of using different mother wavelets for the purpose of feature extraction has been also investigated. A principal component analysis is performed to further reduce the feature dimension. From our extensive experimentations on different palm-print databases, it is found that the performance of the proposed method in terms of recognition accuracy and computational complexity is superior to that of some of the recent methods.