Abstract. This paper makes use of one dimensional Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) to design an efficient palmprint based recognition system. It extracts the palmprint from the hand images which are acquired using a flat bed scanner at low resolution. It uses new techniques to correct the non-uniform brightness of the palmprint and to extract features using difference of 1D-DCT coefficients of overlapping rectangular blocks of variable size and variable orientation. Features of two palmprints are matched using Hamming distance while nearest neighbor approach is used for classification. The system has been tested on three databases, viz. IITK, CASIA and PolyU databases and is found to be better than the well known palmprint systems.