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Hand Geometry

  • Reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Biometrics

  • 173 Accesses

Synonyms

Hand biometrics; Hand shape biometrics

Definition

Biometric modality based on identifying a person by the shape of his or her hand. In its basic form, it is based on taking a photograph of the user’s hand while placed on a surface and, after a contour detection, finding singular points and taking measurements among them.

Introduction

Hand geometry is considered as a medium-profile biometric modality which reaches a really high level of user acceptance with low computational cost. Not being one of the first biometric modalities, it has gained great popularity due to the success of some commercial products, at the end of the twentieth century. In fact, the commercial product from Schlage Recognition Systems, known as HandKey II [1], was one of the most sold at the beginning of the 2000s, especially for physical access control systems and time and attendance control (Fig. 1).

Hand Geometry, Fig. 1
figure 810 figure 810

HandKey II device and illustration of its use as a door lock in a physical access...

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References

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. GUTI (University Group for Identification Technologies), University Carlos III of Madrid, Leganes, Madrid, Spain

    Raul Sanchez-Reillo

Authors
  1. Raul Sanchez-Reillo
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Biometrics and Security, Research & National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Stan Z. Li

  2. Departments of Computer Science and Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

    Anil K. Jain

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Sanchez-Reillo, R. (2015). Hand Geometry. In: Li, S.Z., Jain, A.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Biometrics. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7488-4_251

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