Develop a Lightweight Convolutional Neural Network to Recognize Palms Using 3D Point Clouds

Biometrics has become an important research issue in recent years, and the use of deep learning neural networks has made it possible to develop more reliable and efficient recognition systems. Palms have been identified as one of the most promising candidates among various biometrics due to their unique features and easy accessibility. However, traditional palm recognition methods involve 3D point clouds, which can be complex and difficult to work with. To mitigate this challenge, this paper proposes two methods which are Multi-View Projection (MVP) and Light Inverted Residual Block (LIRB).The MVP simulates different angles that observers use to observe palms in reality. It transforms 3D point clouds into multiple 2D images and effectively reduces the loss of mapping 3D data to 2D data. Therefore, the MVP can greatly reduce the complexity of the system. In experiments, MVP demonstrated remarkable performance on various famous models, such as VGG or MobileNetv2, with a particular improvement in the performance of smaller models. To further improve the performance of small models, this paper applies LIRB to build a lightweight 2D CNN called Tiny-MobileNet (TMBNet).The TMBNet has only a few convolutional layers but outperforms the 3D baselines PointNet and PointNet++ in FLOPs and accuracy. The experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively mitigate the challenges of recognizing palms through 3D point clouds of palms. The proposed method not only reduces the complexity of the system but also extends the use of lightweight CNN. These findings have significant implications for developing biometrics and could lead to improvements in various fields, such as access control and security control.