1. A biometric identification system for identifying a person, the system comprising: an image acquisition module to capture a three-dimensional (3D) image of a palm of the person; a region of interest (ROI) extraction module to extract a 3D subimage from the captured image; and a 3D features extraction module to extract 3D palmprint features from the 3D subimage; wherein the extracted 3D palmprint features are compared to reference 3D palmprint features to verify the identity of the person, and wherein the ROI extraction module extracts a two-dimensional (2D) subimage from the captured image, and further comprises: a 2D features extraction module to extract 2D palmprint features from the 2D subimage and to generate competitive code maps using the extracted 2D palmprint features, and wherein angular distances between the competitive code maps and reference competitive code maps are calculated in order to identify the person.