Abstract: As an emerging biometric technology, palmprint recognition has recently received considerable research interest. Because of its low-price capture device, fast execution speed, and high verification accuracy, palmprint recognition is very competitive in biometric research and is expected to have a wide range of security applications. This paper first introduces the characteristics of the palmprint, the acquisition and the preprocessing method for palmprint image, and then presents a survey of the palmprint recognition algorithms. According to different feature extraction and matching approaches, we roughly group these algorithms into four categories: structure based, statistics based, subspace based and coding based methods. After surveying and comparing these algorithms in each category, we conclude this paper with a discussion of future trends.