Contactless hand biometrics for forensics: review and performance benchmark

Abstract Contactless hand biometrics has emerged as an alternative to traditional biometric characteristics, e.g., fingerprint or face, as it possesses distinctive properties that are of interest in forensic investigations. As a result, several hand-based recognition techniques have been proposed with the aim of identifying both wanted criminals and missing victims. The great success of deep neural networks and their application in a variety of computer vision and pattern recognition tasks has led to hand-based algorithms achieving high identification performance on controlled images with few variations in, e.g., background context and hand gestures. This article provides a comprehensive review of the scientific literature focused on contactless hand biometrics together with an in-depth analysis of the identification performance of freely available deep learning-based hand recognition systems under various scenarios. Based on the performance benchmark, the relevant technical considerations and trade-offs of state-of-the-art methods are discussed, as well as further topics related to this research field.