ICSP2006 Proceedings
Palmprint Identification using Gabor Wavelet Probabilistic Neural Networks 1
Dongmei Sun, Zhengding Qiu, Qiang Li
Institute of Information Science, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, P.R.China
E-mail: dmsun@bjtu.edu.cn
Abstract: In this paper, a novel algorithm for automatic palmprint
identification based on Gabor wavelet probabilistic neural
networks (GWPNN) is proposed, which incorporating advantages
of Gabor wavelet network (GWN) and probabilistic neural
networks (PNN). We first construct a GWN model for each
individual palmprint and then combine it with PNN in a unified
framework that aims to significantly improve the discriminant
capability for palmprint recognition. In our experiments, the
accuracy identification rate can reach 99.5% on the database that
contains 1,971 image samples. It demonstrates that proposed
algorithm is effective and robust.
Key words: palmprint identification, Gabor wavelet, probabilistic
neural networks
1. INTRODUCTION
Recently, palmprint recognition has received much more
attention. Compared with the other available biometric
features, palmprint recognition has several advantages [1]:
(i) palmprints contain more rich information than
fingerprints and hand geometry, so they are more
distinctive; (ii) palmprints are easily captured even with
lower resolution devices, which would be cheaper; (iii)
using a palmprint capturer, all the features of a palm such
as hand geometry, minutiae features, principal and wrinkles
could be combined to build a more accurate and robust
multi-modal biometric system; (iv) user’s acceptability is
high.
Current works on palmprint recognition primarily are
based on two categories of features [2]: (i) statistical
features such as eigenpalm [3], fisherpalm [4], Fourier
transform [5], Gabor filter [6], wavelet transform [7]; (ii)
structural features including principal lines, creases, delta
points, minutiae [8-10].
One of important problems for palmprint recognition is
how to match or classify a palmprint using the extracted
features. There are usually two categories of discrimination
techniques for palmprint recognition. One is based on
minimum distance classifiers. Some popular distance
measurements include Euclidean, Mahalanobis and cosine
distance. The other is constructing decision classifiers by
optimizing an error criterion. One of examples is artificial
neural network.
1 This work is supported by Research Foundation of Beijing Jiaotong University under contracts 2004SM008, the Key Laboratory of
Information Science & Engineering of Railway Ministry under Grant No.0509.
____________________________________
0-7803-9737-1/06/$20.00 ©2006 IEEE
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This paper proposes a new method for palmprint
identification called Gabor wavelet probabilistic neural
networks (GWPNN), which incorporating advantages of
both Gabor wavelet network (GWN) and probabilistic
neural networks (PNN). We first construct a GWN model
for each palmprint and then combine it with PNN in a
unified framework that aims to significantly improve the
discriminability for palmprint identification. The rest of the
paper is organized as follows. GWN is described in Section
2. GWPNN is discussed in Section 3. Section 4 gives some
experimental results. Finally, conclusions are presented in
Section 5.
2. GABOR WAVELET NETWORK
For an automatic pattern identification system, it is
important to accurately extract local features. Wavelet
analysis is desirable for this purpose since it has good
characteristics of space-frequency localization. In particular,
Gabor wavelet functions provide the best possible tradeoff
between spatial and frequency resolution [11]. Furthermore,
using Gabor wavelets analysis is biologically motivated, as
they have similar shapes to the receptive fields of simple
cells in the human visual cortex.
Wavelet networks are the combination of wavelet
theory and neural networks, which using wavelets as
activation function. The strength of wavelet networks lies
in their capabilities of catching essential features in
“frequency-rich” signals. Kruger has proposed a GWN for
face recognition [11]. A set of weighted Gabor wavelets
were used to represent an image. Since GWN was
optimized for the representation of an image, it may not
effectively handle the discriminating features for
recognition [12]. So we extend the GWN to a new
GWPNN.
For a given palmprint image f(x,y), a GWN model is
constructed by a set of Gabor wavelets ^\ i ` :
N
f ( x, y ) ¦ w\ i i < 7W (1)
i 1
 (a) Original palmprint images (b) The representation with GWN for (a)

Fig.1 The palmprint images represented with the optimized GWN

X11

X12
\ 1

X1N1
D1(x
\2 )
Xi1
Di(x) C(x)
Input palmprint Xi2
\i
XiN2

Dm(x)
Xm1

Xm2
\N
XmNm

Gabor wavelets Pattern layer Summation layer Decision layer

Fig. 2 Diagram of GWPNN

Here ^\ i ` is a 2D Gabor wavelet basis function that can Where, W ^w1 , w2 ,!, wN ` denotes a weight vector
be defined as: specific for an individual palmprint image f. N is the
1 ª 1 º number of Gabor wavelets in GWN.
\ i ( x, y) exp « 2 ( x'2  y '2 ) » cos(Z0 x' ) (2) Because Gabor wavelets are non-orthogonal, for a
2SV 2 ¬ 2V ¼ given family < , the weight W can not be calculated by
Where, projection of the Gabor wavelets onto the image f.
x' ai ( x cos T i  y sin T i ), y ' ai ( x sin T i  y cos T i ), According to Kruger [11], this problem can be solved by
Z0 , V , ai ,Ti are the frequency, the deviation related to the

considering the bi-orthogonal family of wavelets < as
follow:
spatial band width, the scale and the orientation 1
respectively. In order to find the GWN for an image f, we W 7f
< < <7
<7 f (4)
minimize the energy function:
2
Fig.1 shows two original palmprint images represented
N
with the optimized GWN.
W arg min f ( x, y )  ¦ wi\ i ( x, y ) (3)
i 1

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 3. GABOR WAVELET PROBABILISTIC NEURAL
NETWORKS

The PNN is one of implementation on Bayes strategy

through finding the minimum risk cost based on the
probability density function. PNN offers several strengths
over back-propagation networks. Besides its generalization
ability, the training speed of PNN is much faster because its
leaning rule is simple and requires only a single pass
(a) The original captured (b) The ROI of the
through the training data [2]. Most important, training a
palmprint image palmprint image
new pattern into a trained PNN requires no retraining of the
existing network links.
Fig.3 The captured palmprint image and the ROI
In this paper, we propose a GWPNN by introducing
of the palmprint
the weight vectors of GWN to PNN as feature patterns. As
show in Fig.2, the diagram consists of five layers. The first
layer receives input palmprint images. The second layer
corresponds to a set of Gabor wavelets, which are used to 20
represent the image patterns with GWN feature space. The
17.5
third layer servers as pattern layer, which receives the
weight vectors of GWN. On receiving a pattern x from the 15

second layer, the neuron xij of the pattern layer computes its Distance
12.5
output [13]:
10
ª ( x  x ij ) T ( x  x ij ) º
g ij ( x ) p (i ) exp «  » (5) 7.5

¬« 2V 2 ¼»
Where, p(i) is a priori probability, xij is the neuron vector, ı
is a smoothing parameter.
The forth layer is summation layer, the neurons
compute the maximum likelihood of pattern x being
classified into Ci through summarizing and averaging the
output of all neurons that belong to the same class:
T and noise canceling of the ROIs, the palmprint database is
1 Ni ª ( x  xij ) ( x  xij ) º
Di ( x) p(i ) ¦ exp «
Ni j 1 ¬« 2V 2
Where, Ni is the number of samples in class Ci.
The final decision output is presented at the last layer.
The output layer unit classifies the pattern x according to
the Bayes’s decision rule based on the output of all the
summation layer neurons:
Cˆ ( x) arg max{Di ( x)}, i 1,2,..., m
In this way, GWPNN inherits the strengths of both
GWN and PNN in image representation and in pattern
classification.
4. EXPERIMENTS
The experimental database is consisted of 1,971 right-
hand images from 98 individuals. To evaluate the stability
of palmprint features, each individual’s hand-image is
collected 2~5 times in a period of 3 month. A special
digital-camera-based device is designed to capture the
images. The original resolution of hand-images is
1792×1200. We take the ROIs (region of interest) out and
5
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20
User No.
Fig. 4. Distance between a test sample and other
20 samples
unify their size to 128×128. After histogram equalization
set up. Fig.3 shows the original captured palmprint image
» (6)
¼»
and the ROI of the palmprint through preprocessing.
The hold-out rule is employed to evaluate the
classification error. Palmprint database is divided into two
non-overlapping sets: training set and testing set. The
training set is made up of 490 palmprint (5 palmprints from
each of unique individual) samples, while the remainder
1481 images make up of the testing set (6-20 samples for
(7) each person).
We investigate the identification performance using
different number of Gabor wavelets for GWPNN. Table 1
displays the correct identification rate as the number
varying from 16 to 100. It is demonstrated that as the
number of Gabor wavelets increase, the correct
identification rate also increase. When 80 Gabor wavelets
are used the identification rate is highest. Even the number
of Gabor wavelets increase, the performance did not
increase anymore.
Fig. 4 shows the distances between a test sample and
20 palmprints in the database. We can see that the output
value of the GWPNN is 3#. It is noticeable that using
GWPNN we can obtain the correct identification rate
99.5%.

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Table 1. Correct identification rate using different
number of Gabor wavelets in GWPNN
Number of 16 25 36 64
wavelets
Identification 75.2 80.5 88.6 96 99.5
rate (%)
5. CONCLUSION
This paper proposes a new method for palmprint
identification called GWPNN, which incorporating
advantages of both GWN and PNN. First, we construct a
GWN model for individual, then the weight vectors of
GWN are introduced to PNN as feature patterns. In this
way, a GWPNN not only has good image representation
ability, but also significantly improve the discriminating
capability for palmprint identification. The experimental
results demonstrate the effectiveness and accuracy of the
method.
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