In this paper, palmprint verification and identification with minimum number of features is proposed. The wide principal line extractors (WPLEs) on the region of interest (ROI) are applied to generate wide principal line images (WPLIs). The WPLI is segmented into 2 × 2, 4 × 4, 8 × 8 and 16 × 16 and the feature value is extracted directly from each segment. Experiments are conducted by using the extracted features. The results show that the equal error rate (EER), decidability index (DI) and correct recognition rate (CRR) of the proposed approach is better than existing methods for PolyUPalmprint Database.