Multimed Tools Appl DOI 10.1007/s11042-017-4475-6 DeepKnuckle: revealing the human identity Gaurav Jaswal 1 · Aditya Nigam 2 · Ravinder Nath 1 Received: 21 September 2016 / Revised: 30 December 2016 / Accepted: 1 February 2017 © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2017 Abstract Identification and authentication are ubiquitous questions which pan across var- ious systems. In certain domains, they are of paramount importance. Like, security forces deploy various human identifications systems to discern potential wrongdoers. They consti- tute a vital part of various government social welfare schemes. The efficacy of the schemes is greatly impacted by them. Being pervasive and eminent, they demand more dedicated and focused research. Now-a-days, most of the systems incorporate a biometric system to address identification and authentication. The biometric system employs disparate traits like face, signature, iris, fingerprint, palmprint, speech, etc. for identification and authentication. A biometric trait must possess the following fundamental aspects; It should be able to iden- tify an individual uniquely. For an individual, it should be consistent. To acquire it should be easy, cost-effective, time-efficient and automated. On such account, fingerprint trait is of outstanding merit. It has been widely studied and is an integral part of the many present bio- metric systems. However, fingerprints are subject to occupational hazard. The fingerprint is of abysmal quality for hand labourer, blacksmith, etc. due to the nature of their work. If a fin- gerprint based biometric system has a large number of such users then its precision is greatly affected. In such scenario, an alternate is to use finger-knuckle-print which possess almost comparable feature as fingerprint while being unaffected by such occupational hazards. In this paper, we propose a novel finger-knuckle-print based biometric system which could be deployed where a large number of user base is rural. Initially, ROI of finger knuckle image  Gaurav Jaswal gauravjaswal@nith.ac.in Aditya Nigam aditya@iitmandi.ac.in Ravinder Nath nath@nith.ac.in 1 National Institute of Technology, Hamirpur, 177005, India 2 Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi, 175005, India