Palmprint recognition aims at finding out the palmprint template from the database, which is from the same palm as a given palmprint input. Feature extraction plays an important role in the recognition process. In this paper, we propose a new feature extraction method by converting a spatial domain palmprint image into a frequency domain image using Fourier Transform (FT) and representing palmprint features in the frequency domain. The extracted features are used as indexes to the palmprint templates in the database and the searching for the best match is leaded by these features in a layered fashion. The experimental result shows that the proposed FT based feature extraction method is effective in terms of accuracy and efficiency on our palmprint database.