1 Abstract This paper presents a new public available database for latent palmprint identification. Latent palmprint identification is an important research area which includes scientific challenges as well as social interest. Latent palmprints appear frequently in criminal investigations so developing accurate identification systems is critical in solving these investigations. Latent palmprint identification includes several pattern recognition challenges such as matching, feature extraction, and image processing. The lack of public latent palmprint databases has limited advances in scientific state-of-the-art researches. The database presented in this paper comprises 380 latent palmprints from 100 palms acquired under realistic conditions. The database includes the minutiae (position and orientation) taken manually and automatically. Additionally new research opportunities based on this database are presented as well as the benchmarks obtained with different publicly available minutiae extractors and matchers. As an example of the possibilities of the database a comparison between automatic and manual minutiae extraction is included. 1. Introduction The ability to identify people is imperative in a globalized world. The usefulness of the biometric information is well accepted by governments, industry and the research community. Applications of the biometric person identification systems are large and they include commercial applications for consumer technology (e.g. Iphone 5), governmental projects (e.g. India’s Unique Identification project) or law enforcement application (e.g. FBI Automatic Fingerprint Identification System), among others. The research community is open to such interest and biometric person recognition research area has grown in last 20 years. The palmprint is one of the most studied biometric traits in the biometric recognition state-of-the-art papers. However, the research community has focused its interest mainly on commercial low resolution palmprint imaging [1][2]. The applications of these algorithms and systems are related with access control and security systems. On the other hand, the number of research papers on latent palmprint identification is scarce. The importance of accurate automatic latent palmprint identification systems which can be used to solve real criminal investigations is well documented in current literature [3][4][5]. It is difficult to establish the reasons for this unbalanced interest (see Table 1). The availability of public databases could be an important fact and the release of a new database could increase interest in the research community. Table 1: Survey of palmprint identification according Google Scholar searches. Palmprint No. of public databases No. of articles No. of Cites Low Res. >10 >200 >2000 Latent Not found >10 >100 Public databases are necessary to ensure common benchmarks in comparing different proposals. Testing different approaches under the same experimental protocols is crucial to advance state-of-the-art research. Several biometric databases have been published recently in some of the most important journals [6][7][8]. In this context, the absence of any publicly available database of latent palmprints is an important deficiency in the research community. This paper presents a new database for latent palmprint biometrics. The database comprises 380 latent palmprints from 100 palms acquired under realistic conditions in a lab environment. Latent prints collected under lab environment are often of good quality and the acquisition protocol have been designed to increase the number of challenging images. The rest of the paper is organized as follow. Section 2 summarizes the latent palmprint databases used in the literature. Section 3 presents the characteristics of the new database (LPIDB v1.0). Section 4 presents the baseline of LPIDB v1.0 - Latent Palmprint Identification Database Aythami Morales a , Miguel A. Medina-Pérez b , Miguel A. Ferrer a , Milton García-Borroto b , Leopoldo Altamirano Robles b a IDeTIC - Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Las Palmas de G. C., C.P. 35017, España. b Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica y Electrónica. Luis Enrique Erro No. 1, Sta. María Tonanzintla, Puebla, C.P. 72840, México amorales@gi.ulpgc.es, migue@inaoep.mx, mferrer@dsc.ulpgc.es, mgarciab@ceis.cujae.edu.cu,robles@inaoep.mx