Authentication through the palmprint is a field of biometrics. Palmprint-based personal verification has quickly entered the biometric family. It has become increasingly popular in the recent years due to its ease of acquisition, reliability and high user acceptance. In this paper, we present an authentication system based on the palmprint. We are particularly interested in the feature extraction step. Three feature extraction techniques based on the discrete wavelet transform, the Gabor filters and the co-occurrence matrix are evaluated. The support vector machine is used for the classification step. The results have been validated on the PolyU database related to 400 users. The best results have been achieved with the wavelet decomposition.