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Hand Geometry

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Biometrics

  • 174 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).

Fig. 1
figure 1

HandKey II device and illustration of its use as a door lock in a physical access control system [

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References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. GUTI (University Group for Identification Technologies), Carlos III University of Madrid, Avda. Universidad, 30, 28911, Leganes (Madrid), Spain

    Raul Sanchez-Reillo (Prof)

Authors
  1. Raul Sanchez-Reillo
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Correspondence to Raul Sanchez-Reillo .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Center Biometrics Research & Security Nat'l. Lab of Pattern Recognition, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Stan Z. Li

  2. Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA

    Anil K. Jain

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Sanchez-Reillo, R. (2014). Hand Geometry. In: Li, S., Jain, A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Biometrics. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27733-7_251-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27733-7_251-2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-27733-7

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference Computer SciencesReference Module Computer Science and Engineering

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