The Hough Transform (HT) is a powerful technique for line detection. Its main advantage is that it is relatively unaffected by noise or gaps in lines. This work proposes a line-based Hough Transform method, which extracts global features for coarse-level filtering in hierarchical palmprint identification system. The local information extracted from position and orientation of individual line is used for further finelevel identification. Line-based Hausdorff Distance (LHD) algorithm is applied for local line matching. This is a novel approach to the application of the Hough transform for feature extraction of palmprint. Experiments had been conducted on a palmprint database collected by Hong Kong Polytechnic University. 99% identification rate has been achieved with much reduced running time.