Secure identity authentication is important in defense technology fields and public security. Palmprint is a good biometric modality used for authentication on mobile devices. Unfortunately, the background of palmprint image collected with mobile devices is random and changeable. Usually, the region of interest is localized based on the key points of the inter-finger-valley. In order to resist the random and variable background interference and effectively remove the false inter-finger-valley contours, this paper develops a key point localization method based on intersecting circle for palmprint preprocessing. Since the contour curvature of inter-finger-valley is greater than that of the rest of the hand, each contour point is taken as the center of an intersecting circle, and the radius of the intersecting circle is set according to the finger width. The developed method can determine the set of candidate contour points at the inter-finger-valley. The remained false inter-finger-valley contour points are further removed according to the direction of the central angle. The bottom point of the contour at the inter-finger-valley is used as the key point. The sufficient experiments show that the method in this paper is less dependent on the segmentation effect, and it is robust to false contour and background interference, so the localization and recognition accuracies are high.