  This paper presents a novel personal identification and verification system
using information extracted from the hand shape and texture. The system has two
major constituent modules: a fully automatic and robust peg free segmentation
and pose normalisation module, and a recognition module. In the first module,
the hand is segmented from its background using a thresholding technique based
on Otsu`s method combined with a skin colour detector. A set of fully automatic
algorithms are then proposed to segment the palm and fingers. In these
algorithms, the skeleton and the contour of the hand and fingers are estimated
and used to determine the global pose of the hand and the pose of each
individual finger. Finally the palm and fingers are cropped, pose corrected and
normalised. In the recognition module, various shape and texture based features
are extracted and used for matching purposes. The modified Hausdorff distance,
the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) and Independent Component Analysis (ICA)
algorithms are used for shape and texture features of the fingers. For the
palmprints, we use the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), directional line
features and ICA. Recognition (identification and verification) tests were
performed using fusion strategies based on the similarity scores of the fingers
and the palm. Experimental results show that the proposed system exhibits a
superior performance over existing systems with an accuracy of over 98\% for
hand identification and verification (at equal error rate) in a database of 560
different subjects.
