1. A method for capturing biometric data of a hand comprising the steps of: digitally photographing a designated contactless capture area not having any predefined hand-positioning structures or platen for receiving a hand, to obtain a captured image of the capture area that includes a naturally-posed hand; extracting a frontal hand image of the naturally-posed hand by applying an Active Appearance Model (AAM) to the captured image; and computing a plurality of hand geometry measurements of the frontal hand image.