1. A contactless hand recognition system for identifying an individual, comprising: an imaging device producing a video image signal of a person's hand; a computer-processing unit; an image processing unit contained in said computer-processing unit, connected to said imaging device for receiving said video image of a person's hand based on measurable biometrics characteristics of said hand with the image comprising at least one of: (i) finger dimensions, (ii) palm dimensions, (iii) location of visible features on hand, (iv) location of thermal features of the hand, and (v) entire hand; a software program within said image processing unit that extracts said persons hand image from said video image; a minutia generator that processes said extracted hand image to generate minutia points; a software program to convert the minutia to a biometric template using a mathematical relationship between said minutia points; a database of individual records containing biometric templates; a biometric template match system that compares and computes a percentage of match between said video image biometric template and said biometric template from said database; and an output signal which is produced when said match percentage exceeds a set threshold or a different output signal when said match does not exceed said set threshold.