Palmprint Identification Based on Non-separable Wavelet Filter Banks
Jie Wu1 , Xinge You2 , Yuan Yan Tang2,3 , Yiu-ming Cheung2
1
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Hubei University, Wuhan, China
2
Department of Electronics and Information Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China
3
Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong
E-Mail: wujie0032@126.com, youxg@mail.hust.edu.cn
Abstract
Creases, as a special salient feature of palmprint, are
large in number and distributed at all directions. It changes
slowly in a person’s whole life, which qualifies themselves
as features in palmprint identification. In this paper, we
devised a new algorithm of crease extraction by using
non-separable bivariate wavelet filter banks with linear
phase. Compared with the traditional wavelet, our research
demonstrates that the three high frequency sub-images
generated by Non-separable Discrete Wavelet Transform
(NDWT) can extract more creases and no longer extensively
focus on the three special directions. As a consequence, we
proposed a new method by combining NDWT and Support
Vector Machines (SVM) for palmprint identification. Tested
by our experiment, this method achieves a satisfied identifi-
cation result and computational efficiency as well.
Keywords: Palmprint identification; NDWT
1. Introduction
Biometrics-based personal identification is regarded as
a reliable method for automatically recognizing during the
last few years [8]. Lots of interesting and meaningful re-
search results have been achieved at the same time. As a
new research area of this technology, the palmprint identi-
fication has been greatly emphasized recently because of
its advantages such as low cost and stable structure fea-
ture. Therefore, the investigation and development in palm-
print identification become particularly valuable.
Generally speaking, the previous work on palmprint
recognition focused on two aspects: first, extracting the
textural characteristics of palmprints (principle lines and
creases) in spatial domain [1], [5]; second, transforming the
palmprint images into the frequency domain to obtain the
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energy distribution feature [2], [3], [4]. However, in the first
method, the three types of basic creases: principal lines,
wrinkles and ridges are difficult to extract directly from
a palmprint image. In the second approach, the singular
information which obtained from the 2-D Wavelet Trans-
form (WT ) are extensively focusing on the three special
directions (vertical, horizontal and diagonal), an enormous
amount of singular information in other directions can not
be revealed in the high frequency components. Thus, the
problem with these two approaches suggest that new meth-
ods are required for palmprint identification.
The non-separable wavelet, is one of the filter banks,
which constructed by using the centrally symmetric or-
thogonal matrices. It is also holding the ability of multi-
resolution analysis and low computational complexity as
traditional wavelet. Our investigation demonstrates that the
high frequency components from NDWT can capture more
singular information than traditional wavelets. Moreover,
when we select different parameters, we could obtain differ-
ent filter banks which emphasize different directional fea-
ture. Therefore, it motivates us to apply an approach based
on the non-separable wavelet to extract the features.
The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 describes
the non-separable wavelet filter banks. Section 3 shows the
algorithm of feature extraction. Section 4 provides experi-
mental results. Section 5 gives a conclusion.
2. The Non-separable Wavelet Filter Banks
In digital images processing, multivariate filter banks are
especially important. A commonly used method to build
multivariate filter banks is the tensor products of univariate
filters. Nevertheless, this construction of multivariate filter
banks focuses extensively on the coordinate direction. In
this paper, we give a general description on how to con-
struct the non-separable wavelet filter banks by using cen-
trally symmetric matrices. The further theory of construc- 3. Feature Extraction and Algorithm
tion is presented in our previous work [6], [7].
In this section, we firstly consider the following 4 × 4 As we known, the traditional two-dimension WT has
centrally symmetric orthogonal matrix H(θ,η) : four orthogonal sub-images which corresponding to LL,
 
 cosθ + cosη −sinθ + sinη −sinθ − sinη cosθ − cosη  LH, HL and HH at each level of decomposition.
 sinθ − sinη cosθ + cosη cosθ − cosη sinθ + sinη 
 sinθ + sinη cosθ − cosη cosθ + cosη sinθ − sinη  (1)
 
cosθ − cosη −sinθ − sinη −sinθ + sinη cosθ + cosη

where (θ, η) is the arbitrary real number pair. By using the

above matrix H(θ,η) we will construct the following Non-
separable bivariate wavelet filter banks. According to MRA,
the designed orthogonal FIR and QMF filter banks: m0 , m1 ,
m2 , m3 should satisfy the following conditions:
(a): The low-pass filter m0 satisfying the orthogonal con-
dition;
(b): The matrix generated from four filters m0 , m1 , m2 ,
m3 is unitary.
By using the previous matrix H(θ,η) on the viewpoint of
polyphase. The four filters m j (z1 , z2 ), j = 0, 1, 2, 3 are de- (a)
fined as follows: separable wavelet (db4)
 N 
1 Y 
m j (z1 , z2 ) = (1, z1 , z2 , z1 z2 )  H(θx ,ηx ) D(z1 , z2 )H(θx ,ηx )  V j
2 2 T
(2)
4 k=1

let z1 = e−iξ , z2 = e−iη , ∂D = {z : |z| = 1}

 
 1 0 0 0 

 0 z 0 0 
D(z1 , z2 ) =  1
 , (z , z ) ∈ ∂D × ∂D (3)
 0 0 z2 0  1 2
0 0 0 z1 z2

V0 = (1, 1, 1, 1)T ; V1 = (1, −1, 1, −1)T

V2 = (1, 1, −1, −1)T ; V3 = (1, −1, −1, 1)T (4)
For any given positive integer N, the arbitrary real num- (b)
ber pairs (θk , ηk ), k = 1, 2, · · · , N (the (θk , ηk ) may equal to non−separable wavelet
(θ j , η j ) while k , j ) can generate different filter banks.
For example, when the N = 1, θ = 0.386, η = 0.125, the Figure 1. Wavelet decomposition
filter banks can be represented in matrix form as follows:
  Similarly, the previous non-separable wavelet filter
 0.3125 0.0410 −0.0173 0.1319  banks also can generate four orthogonal sub-images which
 0.0816 −0.0107 −0.0045 −0.0345 
m0 =   corresponding to the filters m0 , m1 , m2 and m3 at each level
 −0.0345 −0.0045 −0.0107 0.0816  of decomposition. Here the sub-image corresponding to the
0.1319 −0.0173 0.0410 0.3125
filter m0 carries low frequency information as coarse as pos-
 
 0.2679 0.0352 0.0273 −0.2081  sible. The other three parts capture high frequency informa-
 0.0700 −0.0092 0.0071 0.0543  tion of the image in different directions. As Figure 1 shown,
m1 =  

 −0.0543 −0.0071 0.0092 −0.0700 the three high frequency components could capture more
0.2081 −0.0273 −0.0352 −0.2679 singular information than tensor products WT , and the ap-
 
 0.2081 0.0273 −0.0352 0.2679  proximation of original image is much coarser than the low
 0.0543 −0.0071 −0.0092 −0.0700  frequency component from the tensor products WT .
m2 =  

 0.0700 0.0092 0.0071 −0.0543 Feature vector, which represents the original palmprint,
−0.2679 0.0352 −0.0273 −0.2081 should well distinguish the palmprints from different per-
 
 0.1319 0.0173 0.0410 −0.3125  son.It is obvious that, the sub-image cropped from the cen-
 0.0345 −0.0045 0.0107 0.0816  tral of palmprint contains an enormous of creases in differ-
m3 =  

 0.0816 0.0107 −0.0045 0.0345 ent directions. As a consequence, it is reasonable for us to
−0.3125 0.0410 0.0173 0.1319 apply a method based on MRA to represent the multi-scale

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feature. Here, we will describe the general construction of
NDWF by using the above non-separable wavelet.
Our previous studies showed that the three high fre-
quency components obtain from NDWT can capture more
singular information than traditional wavelets. However,
as we have mentioned above, the crease in high frequency
components is vital to our identification. Thus, it bene-
fits us from the viewpoint of NDWT to construct the fea-
ture vector. When the palmprint decomposed by NDWT in
the I-th level, the original palmprint G can be represented
by 3I + 1 decomposed sub-images: [AI , {Hi , Vi , Di }i=1,2...,I ],
where AI is the low frequency sub-image of original palm-
print, {Hi , Vi , Di }i=1,2,··· ,I are the high frequency sub-images.
For each high frequency sub-image, we extract the sta-
tistical feature: mean, which defined as follows:
1 XX
m n
Mi = |Hi (x, y)|
m ∗ n x=1 y=1
where Hi (x, y) corresponds to the coefficient of high fre-
quency sub-images at i-th level, while m, n denote it width
and height.
The mean reflects the distribution of palmprint’s details
in different direction at each non-separable wavelet decom-
pose level. Hence, the vector (6) constituted by the means
of all high frequency sub-images could describe the statisti-
cal intensity of original palmprint efficiently.
T d = (M1 , M2 , · · · , MI )d (6)
where I is the total decomposition level. d refers to the
three high frequency sub-images from NDWT .
Nevertheless, the feature vector we obtain only by com-
puting the mean from high frequency sub-images is a global
feature of palmprint. It fails to preserve the information
concerning the spatial location of different details. To deal
with this problem, we divide the original palmprint G into
n × n non-overlap blocks equally. For each blocks we apply
4-th non-separable wavelet transform, and 3 × 4 × n × n high
frequency sub-images are obtained consequently. Then we
use the means of all high frequency sub-images which com-
puted from (5) to form a vector F, here we called as NDWF
(see Figure 2).
F = ( f1 , f2 , · · · , fn×n ) (7)
 
where fk = T 1d , T 2d , · · · , T Id
k=1,2,··· ,n×n
The feature matching is based on measuring the simi-
larity between two NDWF s F1 and F2 . As a conventional
classifier, Nearest Neighbor algorithm (NN) is commonly
adopted in palmprint identification. However, in recent re-
search work, the S V M classifier has demonstrated better
performance than NN. In this paper, the S V M is applied to
final classification.
To sum up, our method is composed of the two factors,
which could simply termed as NDWT + S V M. The general
procedures can be summarized as below:
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original palmprint G
n×n sub-images
Divide
3×4×n×n
high
ĂĂĂ
frequency
4-th NDWT
components
ĂĂĂĂĂĂ
compute the mean of each high frequency components
NDWF
Figure 2. Construction of NDWF
(5)
step 1 Divide original palmprint into 4 × 4 non-overlap blocks;
step 2 Decompose the sub-images by non-separable wavelet to
4th level;
step 3 For all the high frequency components, compute the means
and construct the NDWF;
step 4 Use the S V M to compute the correctness.
4. Experimental Results
In this section, we compare the results of our method
with some others which most of them are based on tradi-
tional WT , such as WT +NN, WT + S V M, NDWT + NN.
Experiments are conducted by the PolyU Palmprint
Database, which contains 600 palmprints captured from 100
different persons, six samples from each of them were col-
lected. Three palmprints are chosen randomly in each per-
son for training and the rest are for testing. Thus, a train-
ing samples set of 300 palmprints and a testing samples set
with 300 palmprints are created. In this way, we run the
system 10 times and obtain 10 different training and test-
ing databases. For each time, we do the same procedures
for WT method and compare the results of our method with
others at two aspects: the identification accuracy and the
computation time. The identification accuracy is decided
by the top response rate achieved, and the computation time
can be classified into two part: the first is defined as the
seconds used for feature extraction of one palmprint, the
second is the time used for classification of 300 palmprints.
The experimental results for WT + NN, WT + S V M,
NDWT + NN, NDWT + S V M are summarized in Table1.
In the experiments, the blocks used for WT method are ex-
actly the same as NDWT . It is obvious that the NDWT per-
forms better than WT both in identification accuracy and
computation time. The NDWT + S V M method achieves
99.67% accuracy which is 1.33 percent better than WT +
S V M, and the computation time used for feature extraction
of one palmprint is much lower. Moreover, when we choose
the conventional classifier NN algorithm, the NDWT gives
better performance than WT by 1.67 percent.
Table 1. Comparisons of computational time and recog-
nition rate among other methods
method computation time
WT + NN 0.234s+3.594s
NDWT + NN 0.062s+3.594s
WT + S V M 0.234s+3.204s
NDWT + S V M 0.062s+3.204s
In order to test the reliability of our proposed method,
we conduct the experiments of above four methods with de-
composition level ranging from 1 to 4 for each palmprint.
As Figure 3 shown, when we choose the same classifier, the
methods based on NDWT are superior to the methods based
on WT in each decomposition level. Moreover, the identifi-
cation rate of NDWT is increasing as long as the decompo-
sition level improving. When the palmprint is decomposed
by NDWT to 4-th level, we could obtain the identification
rate of 99.67% while WT reaches only 98.33%.
100
99
98
97
different directional information, which is suitable for
extracting the irregular creases of palmprint. In order to
reflect the distribution of creases in different directions at
different resolutions, we decomposed the original palmprint
to 4-th level by NDWT , and compute the means of each
high frequency component to form a NDWF. To verify
the reliability of our method, we conduct experiments to
compare our method with some others under different
decomposition levels. And it has been proved that the pro-
accuracy posed method is superior to others in terms of identification
97.67% accuracy and efficiency.
99.33%
98.33% Acknowledgement
99.67%
This work is supported by the grant 607731871 from
the NSFC, NCET-07-0338 from the Ministry of Education,
and the grant 2006ABA023, 2007CA011 and 2007ABA036
from the Department of Science & Technology in Hubei
province, China. Xinge You is the Corresponding author.
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