In this paper, a novel biontetric identification system is presented to identify a person’s identity by his/her palmprint. In contrast to existing palmprint systems for criminal applications, the proposed system targets at the civil applications, which require identifying a person in a large database with high accuracy in real-time. The system is constituted by four major components: User Interface Module, Acquisition Module, Recognition Module and Extal Module. More than 7,000 palmprint images have been collected to test the performance of the system. The system can identify 400 palms with a low false acceptance rate, 0.02%, and a high genuine acceptance rate, 98.83%. For verification, the system can operate at a false acceptance rate, 0.017% and a false rejection rate, 0.86%. The execution time for the whole process including image collection, preprocessing, feature extraction and matching is less than 1 second.