Deep and Shallow Feature Fusion in Feature Score Level for Palmprint Recognition

Contactless palmprint recognition offers friendly customer experience due to its ability to operate without touching the recognition device under rigid constrained conditions. Recent palmprint recognition methods have shown promising accuracy; however, there still exist some issues that need to be further studied such as the limited discrimination of the single feature and how to effectively fuse deep features and shallow features. In this paper, deep features and shallow features are integrated into a unified framework using feature‐level and score‐level fusion methods. Specifically, deep feature is extracted by residual neural network (ResNet), and shallow features are extracted by principal component analysis (PCA), linear discriminant analysis (LDA), and competitive coding (CompCode). In feature‐level fusion stage, ResNet feature and PCA feature are dimensionally reduced and fused by canonical correlation analysis technique to achieve the fused feature for the next stage. In score‐level fusion stage, score information is embedded in the fused feature, LDA feature, and CompCode feature to obtain a more reliable and robust recognition performance. The proposed method achieves competitive performance on Tongji dataset and demonstrates more satisfying generalization capabilities on IITD and CASIA datasets. Comprehensive validation across three palmprint datasets confirms the effectiveness of our proposed deep and shallow feature fusion approach.