This paper presents a novel real-time palmprint recognition system for cooperative user applications. This system is the first one achieving noncontact capturing and recognizing palmprint images under unconstrained scenes. Its novelties can be described in two aspects. The first is a novel design of image capturing device. The hardware can reduce influences of background objects and segment out hand regions efficiently. The second is a process of automatic hand detection and fast palmprint alignment, which aims to obtain normalized palmprint images for subsequent feature extraction. The palmprint recognition algorithm used in the system is based on accurate ordinal palmprint representation. By integrating power of the novel imaging device, the palmprint preprocessing approach and the palmprint recognition engine, the proposed system provides a friendly user interface and achieves a good performance under unconstrained scenes simultaneously.