SYEnet: Simple yet effective network for palmprint recognition

Palmprint recognition techniques have been widely applied in security authentication. As a typical image processing method, convolutional neural network (CNN) has been applied to extract features from palmprint images. However, most existing CNN methods cannot meet the demand in recognition speed due to their high computational complexity. This paper proposes a simple yet effective network (SYEnet) for palmprint recognition, which is a lightweight neural network. SYEnet is composed of four learnable feature extraction networks, which can extract discriminative information from 9 patches. In addition, a dedicated network for palmprint ROI extraction (PREnet) is designed. PREnet extracts ROI from the original image, generating ROI images of consistent dimensions, which can be adapted to complex environments without limitations of lighting, gesture, image quality, and resolution. Moreover, a new contactless palmprint database is collected to validate our method. The database contains 12,800 images from 400 palms and provides data supplementation for current research on palmprint recognition. The proposed SYEnet is evaluated on eight real-world palmprint databases, in comparison to other related methods. Experimental results prove that our method is more efficient and has higher recognition accuracy.