The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Contactless Hand Dorsal Images Database

There has been increasing resrarch and development interest in the use of finger knuckle patterns to establish human identity for the civilian and forensic applications. Prior efforts have however only focused on evaluating major and first minor finger knuckle which are formed on the finger dorsal surface joining proximal, middle and distal phalanx bones. This database has been mainly been established to investigate the possible use of second minor finger knuckle patterns which are formed on the finger dorsal surface joining proximal and the metacarpal phalanx bones. The second minor finger knuckle patterns can either be used as independent biometric patterns or employed to improve the performance from the major and first minor finger knuckle patterns. The objective in this work has been to establish a large scale (over 500 people) hand dorsal image database for the research and make it available in the public domain to help initiate research efforts in comparing, exploring relationship and combining multiple major and minor knuckle patterns for their usage in biometrics.

Brief Description

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Contactless Hand Dorsal Images Database is contributed from the male and female volunteers. This database has been largely acquired in IIT Delhi Campus, in The Hong Kong Polytechnic University campus and in some villages in India during 2006-2015, mostly by using a mobile and hand held camera. This database has 2505 hand dorsal images from the right hand of 501 different subjects that illustrate three knuckle patterns in each of the four fingers from the individual subject. All the images are in bitmap (*.bmp) format. This database also has additional hand dorsal images from 211 different subjects but these images lack clarity or does not have second minor knuckle patterns. The combined database from 712 different subjects hand dorsal images is made publicly available. This database also provides two session hand dorsal images, with many samples in different age groups that have been acquired after very long interval ( 4 to 8 years) to support studies relating to the stability of knuckle patterns. This database also provides segmented/normalized major, first minor and second minor knuckle images using completely automated segmentation.Such images are made available for all the subjects and different/respective fingers and can be easily identified using the names of respective images/folders in the database.

Sample Images

The entire database as detailed above is made available to support further research and development efforts. The sample images from six different subjects in the database are reproduced in the following.

Download and Copyright

The database is being made available for the researchers from June 2016 onwards. Interested researchers should follow following steps to acquire "The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Contactless Hand Dorsal Images Database"