  Palmprints are emerging as a new entity in multi-modal biometrics for human
identification and verification. Multispectral palmprint images captured in the
visible and infrared spectrum not only contain the wrinkles and ridge structure
of a palm, but also the underlying pattern of veins; making them a highly
discriminating biometric identifier. In this paper, we propose a feature
encoding scheme for robust and highly accurate representation and matching of
multispectral palmprints. To facilitate compact storage of the feature, we
design a binary hash table structure that allows for efficient matching in
large databases. Comprehensive experiments for both identification and
verification scenarios are performed on two public datasets -- one captured
with a contact-based sensor (PolyU dataset), and the other with a contact-free
sensor (CASIA dataset). Recognition results in various experimental setups show
that the proposed method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art
methods. Error rates achieved by our method (0.003% on PolyU and 0.2% on CASIA)
are the lowest reported in literature on both dataset and clearly indicate the
viability of palmprint as a reliable and promising biometric. All source codes
are publicly available.
