Contact-free Hand Geometry-based Identification System This paper presents an approach for personal identification using hand geometrical features, in which the infrared illumination device is employed to improve the usability of this hand recognition system. In the proposed system, prospective users can place their hand freely in front of the camera without any pegs or templates. Moreover, the proposed system can be widely used under dark environment and complex background scenarios. To achieve better detection accuracy, in total 13 important points are detected from a palm image, and 34 features calculated from these points are used to further recognition. Experimental results demonstrate that the averaged Correct Identification Rate (CIR) is 96.23% and averaged False Accept Rate (FAR) is 1.85%. These results prove that the proposed contact-free system can be considered as an effective identity verification system for practical applications.