In today's modern world, reliable automatic personal recognition is a crucial area of discussion, primarily because of the increased security risks. A large number of systems first require the recognition of a person before they can access their services. Biometric recognition can be used, which can be understood as automatic identification or automatic verification of persons based on physiological or behavioural characteristics. Examples of biometric characteristics may be the fingerprint, face, signature, hand geometry. There are many approaches, and each has its pros and cons. However, there is currently no current extensive research and evaluation of hand-based biometric systems. Given the userfriendliness of these systems and the needs of society, this article aims to compare different methods of biometric recognition based on hand, so that the article reduces the entry barrier into this area of research. Furthermore, the article aims to determine the research gap and suggest possible directions for research in the future.

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Today, data security is an increasingly hot topic, and thus also the security and reliability of end-user identity verification, i.e. authentication. In recent years, banks began to substitute password authentication by more secure ways of authentication because passwords were not considered to be secure enough. Current legislation even forces banks to implement multifactor authentication of their clients. Banks, therefore, consider using biometric authentication as one of the possible ways. To verify a user's identity, biometric authentication uses unique biometric characteristics of the user. Examples of such methods are facial recognition, iris scanning, fingerprints, and so on. This paper deals with another biometric feature that could be used for authentication in mobile banking applications; as almost all mobile phones have an integrated camera, hand authentication can make a banking information system more secure and its user interface more convenient. Although the idea of hand biometric authentication is not entirely new and there exist many ways of implementing it, our approach based on using convolutional neural networks is not only innovative, but its results are promising as well. This paper presents a modern approach to identifying users by convolutional neural networks when this type of neural network is used both for hand features extraction and bank user identity validation.

Research background: One of the significant globalization consequences is a threat of rapidly spreading communicable diseases. In recent months, COVID-19 has spread worldwide. It is a highly infectious disease, which is manifested mainly by fever, respiratory problems, muscle pain and fatigue. Therefore, there is a need to reliable monitor people’s body temperature. If the monitoring process takes places in enclosed spaces, the procedure may be performed at the entrance to the building. However, the problem occurs in public spaces. Therefore, to solve this problem, we propose the use of a drone with a thermal camera for scanning people in public spaces and subsequent evaluation using classification methods. Purpose of the article: The aim of this article is to create a model for sensing and measuring the body temperature of people in public spaces so that the global impacts of COVID-19 on the economy and society are reduced. Methods: To monitor large areas, it is necessary to have suitable methods for obtaining quality data. One of the methods for obtaining data with the high spatial resolution is the use of UAVs with a planned flight. Artificial intelligence methods will be used for the classification of persons; their representatives are, e.g. convolutional neural networks. Findings & Value added: The proposed model of sensing and subsequent classification of people into groups (normal body temperature, elevated body temperature). The output of the model will help to monitor the spread of infectious diseases (the condition is a symptom - increased body temperature) in today’s globalized world.

Automatic gender recognition is one of the frequently solved tasks in computer vision. It is useful for analysing human behaviour, intelligent monitoring or security. In this article, gender is recognized based on multispectral images of the hand. Hand (palm and back) images are obtained in the visible spectrum and thermal spectrum; then a fusion of images is performed. Some studies say that it is possible to distinguish male and female hands by some geometric features of the hand. The aim of this article is to determine whether it is possible to recognize gender by the thermal characteristics of the hand and, at the same time, to find the best architecture for this recognition. The article compares several algorithms that can be used to solve this issue. The convolutional neural network (CNN) AlexNet is used for feature extraction. The support vector machine, linear discriminant, naive Bayes classifier and neural networks were used for subsequent classification. Only CNNs were used for both extraction and subsequent classification. All of these methods lead to high accuracy of gender recognition. However, the most accurate are the convolutional neural networks VGG-16 and VGG-19. The accuracy of gender recognition (test data) is 94.9% for the palm and 89.9% for the back. Experiments in comparative studies have had promising results and shown that multispectral hand images (thermal and visible) can be useful in gender recognition.