Ensemble of local and global information for finger-knuckle-print recognition

Biometrics authentication is an effective method for automatically recognizing a person's identity. Recently, it has been found that the finger-knuckle-print (FKP), which refers to the inherent skin patterns of the outer surface around the phalangeal joint of one's finger, has high capability to discriminate different individuals, making it an emerging biometric identifier. In this paper, based on the results of psychophysics and neurophysiology studies that both local and global information is crucial for the image perception, we present an effective FKP recognition scheme by extracting and assembling local and global features of FKP images. Specifically, the orientation information extracted by the Gabor filters is coded as the local feature. By increasing the scale of Gabor filters to infinite, actually we can get the Fourier transform of the image, and hence the Fourier transform coefficients of the image can be taken as the global features. Such kinds of local and global features are naturally linked via the framework of time-frequency analysis. The proposed scheme exploits both local and global information for the FKP verification, where global information is also utilized to refine the alignment of FKP images in matching. The final matching distance of two FKPs is a weighted average of local and global matching distances. The experimental results conducted on our FKP database demonstrate that the proposed local-global information combination scheme could significantly improve the recognition accuracy obtained by either local or global information and lead to promising performance of an FKP-based personal authentication system. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.