In this paper, we propose an efficient palmprint recognition scheme which has two features: 1) representation of palm images by two dimensional (2-D) wavelet subband coefficients and 2) recognition by a modular, personalized classification method based on Kernel Principal Component Analysis (Kernel PCA). Wavelet subband coefficients can effectively capture substantial palm features while keeping computational complexity low. We then kernel transforms to each possible training palm samples and then mapped the high-dimensional feature space back to input space. Weighted Euclidean linear distance based nearest neighbor classifier is finally employed for recognition. We carried out extensive experiments on PolyU Palmprint database includes 7752 palms from 386 different palms. Detailed comparisons with earlier published results are provided and our proposed method offers better recognition accuracy (99.654%).