The rapid and widespread development of Information Technology results in a tremendous need for the development of reliable, safe and secure identification of individuals. Henceforth, biometric rightly enters into the field to overcome the aforementioned challenge. Palmprint is considered as a relatively new promising biometric trait that has attained an increasing research interest due to its reliability, stability, distinctiveness, environment flexibility, low-resolution imaging, low-cost capturing device, and user-friendly characteristics. This paper attempts to provide an overview of biometric system operations, palmprint biometric recognition concepts and also it compares the various palmprint feature extraction and matching methods and finally the future research directions are discussed