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The problem of person recognition and verification based on their hand images has been addressed. The system is based on the images of the right hands of the subjects, captured by a flatbed scanner in an unconstrained pose at 45 dpi. In a preprocessing stage of the algorithm, the silhouettes of hand images are registered to a fixed pose, which involves both rotation and translation of the hand and, separately, of the individual fingers. Two feature sets have been comparatively assessed, Hausdorff distance of the hand contours and independent component features of the hand silhouette images. Both the classification and the verification performances are found to be very satisfactory as it was shown that, at least for groups of about five hundred subjects, hand-based recognition is a viable secure access control scheme.