A new personal recognition system using the palm vein pattern is presented in this article. It is the first time that the palm vein pattern is used for personal recognition. The texture feature of palm vein is extracted by wavelet decomposition. With our palm vein image database, we employed the nearest neighbor (NN) classifier to test the performance of the system. Experimental results show that the algorithm based on wavelet transform can reach a correct recognition rate (CRR) of 98.8%.