Personal identification continues to be a problem of interest to many researchers. Biometrics, which are physiological or behavioral characteristics used to distinguish between individuals, are used as a solution to this problem. Researchers have investigated the use of a number of biometric identifiers including face, iris, and voice for various applications. Another source for biometric identifiers is the hand knuckle[1]. Hand based systems are currently used in many applications.
Researchers have determined that the hand contains features that can be used for personal identification. The rapid growth in the use of e-commerce applications and penetration of information technology into daily life requires reliable user identification for effective
Therefore the exploitation of localized information, rather than the global appearance based information employed in, can generate more reliable performance and is proposed in this work. It is important to ascertain the nature of information that can be extracted from the finger dorsal images[8]. This paper focuses on this problem and investigates the possibility of using minor finger knuckle patterns for the biometric identification. Accurate identification of finger knuckle patterns can be beneficial for several applications involving forensic and covert identification of suspects[9]. There are several classes of forensic images in which the finger knuckle patterns are the only piece of evidence available to identify the suspect. Investigation into the uniqueness of minor finger knuckle patterns is vital for their usage in forensic identification of suspects. Knuckle patterns can be simultaneously acquired using traditional finger knuckle imaging
The finger back surface, also known as the dorsum of the hand, can be highly useful in user identification and has not yet attracted the attention of researchers. The image-pattern formation from the finger-knuckle bending is highly unique and makes this surface a distinctive biometric identifier. The blood vessels, as part of the circulatory system, transport blood throughout the body to sustain the metabolism, using a network of arteries, veins, and capillaries. The use of such vascular structures in the palm, palm–dorsal, and fingers has been investigated in the biometrics literature with high success. The key objective of this work is to investigate the possibility of using finger knuckle patterns, formed between proximal and the metacarpal phalanx bones of the fingers, for automated human identification. It may be noted that prior work available in the literature has investigated the finger knuckle patterns formed on finger dorsal surface joining middle phalanx and proximal phalanx bones (PIP joints) etc. There has also been some work on investigating knuckle patterns formed between distal and middle phalanx bones (DIP joints) reported in the literature. However in the best of our knowledge there has not been any study to ascertain the possibility of exploiting knuckle patterns formed between metacarpal and the proximal phalanx bones of fingers for the