Palmprint recognition is an accepted and widely used biometric. Richness of feature and the less cost involved in acquisition make it more reliable and user friendly. The region of interest is extracted from the palmprint image as a preprocessing step. Contourlet transform, a pyramidal directional filter bank is then applied to capture both local and global details of the palmprint. The large number of coefficients generated from the contourlet transform are minimised as a dimensionality reduction process, by calculating energies for each subband. Palmprint matching is then performed using nearest neighbor classifier.