Abstract. Automatic personal identification based on palmprints has been considered as a promising technology in biometrics family during recent years. In pursuit of accurate palmprint recognition approaches, it is a key issue to design proper image representation to describe skin textures in palm regions. According to previous achievements, directional texture measurement provides a powerful tool for depicting palmprint appearances. Most of successful approaches can be ranged into this framework. Following this idea, we propose a novel palmprint representation in this paper, which describes palmprint images by constructing rank correlation statistics of appearance patterns within local image areas. Promising experimental results on two large scale palmprint databases demonstrate that the proposed method achieves even better performances than the state-of-the-art approaches.