As the first attempt of automatic personal identification by palmprint, in this paper, two novel characteristics, datum point invariance and line feature matching, are presented in palmprint verification. The datum points of palmprint, which have the remarkable advantage of invariable location, are defined and their determination using the directional projection algorithm is developed. Then, line feature extraction and line matching are proposed to detect whether a couple of palmprints are from the same palm. Various palmprint images have been tested to illustrate the effectiveness of the palmprint verification with both characteristics.