Automatic Palm Print Identification Project

UK-based researchers are developing technology that would allow fragments of palm prints to give up their owners' identity at crime scenes.

Working at Wolverhampton University, they're involved in a three year programme named the Automatic Palm Print Identification project. Their goal is to construct a dataset that can be used in tandem with the UK's primary biometric database - IDENT1.

IDENT1 currently holds over seven million fingerprint samples, along with more than two million palm prints, and - developed by US aerospace/defence firm Northrop Grumman - it was introduced to take over from the NAFIS (National Automated Fingerprint Identification System).

Palm Print Identification

When it comes to bringing about criminal convictions, palm prints are far less widely used than fingerprints, either due to issues matching them to IDENT1's samples, or timescales, with cases closing before connections can be made.

Presently, fingerprint and palm print identification analyses are performed in a similar way, but palm prints are not only larger in size - they contain much more information. They're also typically left behind as smudged traces, rather than as clear whole prints, so identifying who they belong to is a tricky business.

Automatic Palm Print ID

The Wolverhampton research team is exploring ways that make the automatic palm print ID process easier and more effective.

Among those involved is Professor Ian Sillitoe, who works in the Department of Engineering at Wolverhampton University. "When a palm or finger is put down, you're left with a series of spurs and thin lines, which correspond to ridges and dips in the skin", he explained in comments made to The Engineer.

He continued: "The difficulty lies not just processing the images, but also the computational complexity of matching one partial print against a number of others. We're going to look at novel techniques for filtering and enhancing palm print images."

"We will scan a palm print onto a computer and process it so that the palm's key features are recorded as a set of numbers, which will represent the different patterns on the palm."