This paper presents a biometric recognition system based on hand geometry. We describe a database specially collected for research purposes, which consists of 50 people and 10 different acquisitions of the right hand. This database can be freely downloaded. In addition, we describe a feature extraction procedure and we obtain experimental results using different classification strategies based on Multi Layer Perceptrons (MLP). We have evaluated identification rates and Detection Cost Function (DCF) values for verification applications. Experimental results reveal up to 100% identification and 0% DCF