Patent ID: 8655084

Claim:
A method of classifying the gender of a hand having a plurality of hand parts, the method comprising: for each of at least two digitally-imaged hand parts, where each of the at least two digitally-imaged hand part corresponds to one of the plurality of hand parts, computing a set of feature parameters representing a geometry of the digitally-imaged hand part; using the sets of feature parameters for a set of two or more of the digitally-imaged hand parts, (a) combining sets of feature parameters for different hand parts to form sets of feature parameters for multiple hand parts, wherein a first set of feature parameters corresponds to a hand's fingers and a second set of feature parameters corresponds to the hand's palm and (b) computing a similarity of the set of two or more digitally-imaged hand parts to each of i) a first model eigenspace corresponding to a male class, and ii) a second model eigenspace corresponding to a female class, wherein the computed similarities are distances to each of the first and second eigenspaces; and using the computed distances to classify the gender of the hand as belonging to the male class or the female class comprising: forming a distance vector from the computed distances; comparing the distance vector to each of k-nearest neighbor distance vectors in a set of training data; and classifying the gender of the hand as belonging to the class corresponding to a majority of the k-nearest neighbor distance vectors in the set of training data.