This paper proposes a biometric system for personal identification based on three biometric characteristics from the hand, namely: the palmprint, finger surfaces and hand geometry. A protection scheme is applied to the biometric template data to guarantee its revocability, security and diversity amongst different biometric systems. An error-correcting code (ECC), a cryptographic hash function (CHF) and a binarization module are the core of the template protection scheme. Since the ECC and CHF operate on binary data, an additional feature binarization step is required.
This paper proposes: (1) a novel identification architecture that uses hand geometry as a soft biometric to accelerate the identification process and ensure the system's scalability; and (2) a new feature binarization technique that guarantees that the Hamming distance between transformed binary features is proportional to the difference between their real values.
The proposed system achieves promising recognition and speed performances on two publicly available hand image databases.