Stockwell transform based palm-print recognition

This paper proposes a novel technique to extract palm-print features based on instantaneous-phase difference obtained using Stockwell transform of overlapping circular-strips. The hand images are acquired using a low cost scanner. A procedure is proposed to classify hand images into either right or left hand based on their inherent characteristics and then the palm-print region from the hand image is extracted accordingly. This palm-print region is found to be robust to translation and rotation on the scanner. The proposed system is tested on IITK database of 549 images, CASIA database of 5239 images and PolyU database of 7751 images. The system performs with 100% correct recognition rate (CRR) and equal error rate (EER) less than 1% for all the databases. (C) 2010 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.