REGION COVARIANCE MATRICES AS FEATURE DESCRIPTORS FOR PALMPRINT RECOGNITION USING GABOR FEATURES

Abstract

Region covariance matrices (RCMs) as feature descriptors have been developed due to the advantages of low dimensionality, being scale and illumination independent. How to define a feature mapping vector for the RCMs construction of strong discriminating ability is still an open issue. In this paper, there is a focus on finding a more efficient feature mapping vector for RCMs as palmprint descriptors based on Gabor magnitude and phase (GMP) information. Specially, Gabor magnitude (GM) features of each palmprint image approximate a lognormal distribution. For palmprint recognition, the logarithmic transformation of GM proves to be important for the discriminating ability of corresponding RCMs. All experiments are performed on the public Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) Palmprint Database of 7752 images. The results demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed method, and also show that adding pixel locations and intensity component to the feature mapping vector has a negative effect on palmprint recognition performance for our proposed Log_GMP based RCM method.