Title: Contactless Palmprint Identification: Methods, Performance, and Security Challenges
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Ajay Kumar, Hong Kong Polytechnic University
When: July 28, 2026 at 2:00 pm CEST (8:00 PM Hong Kong Time / 8:00 AM US Eastern Time)
Where: Online (Zoom)
Registration (free but required): https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_sNNF5okfTuG7KvopktBDBw
Abstract
Contactless palmprint identification is emerging as a powerful biometric technology for secure, hygienic, and user-friendly authentication in mobile identity, fintech, e-payments, healthcare, and other public services. This webinar intends to provide an accessible overview of the state of the art in contactless palmprint recognition, including traditional feature-based approaches, deep learning methods, and recent advances in mobile phone-based authentication. Comparative performance trends and accuracy results from current methods will be discussed, highlighting progress as well as limitations in real-world deployment. The talk also plans to examine key security challenges, including presentation attacks, spoof detection, privacy protection, cross-device reliability, and template security. Finally, it will outline future research directions toward accurate, scalable, explainable, and trustworthy contactless palmprint identification.
About The Speaker
Ajay Kumar is a Professor in the Department of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He received a B.Eng. degree an M.Eng., and a Ph.D. from The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, in 2001. Before joining PolyU, he served as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at IIT Delhi from 2005 to 2007.
Professor Kumar’s research focuses on biometrics, with particular emphasis on contactless hand biometrics, vascular biometrics, iris recognition, and multimodal biometric systems. He holds seven U.S. patents and has authored two books, including Contactless 3D Fingerprint Identification (2018) and Iris and Periocular Recognition using Deep Learning (2024). A Fellow of IAPR and IEEE, he has held several prominent leadership roles in the biometrics community, including President of the IEEE Biometrics Council (2021–2022), and has served on editorial boards of several leading journals, including IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (2020-2025).
