Palmprint recognition is a variant of fingerprint matching as both the systems share almost similar matching criteria and the minutiae feature extraction methods. However, there is a performance degradation with palmprint biometrics because of the failure of extracting genuine minutia points from the region of highly distorted ridge information with huge data. In this paper, we propose an efficient palmprint matching algorithm using nearest neighbor minutiae quadruplets. The representation of minutia points in the form of quadruplets improves the matching accuracy at nearest neighbors by discarding scope of the global matching on false minutia points. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on publicly available high resolution palmprint standard databases, namely, palmprint benchmark data sets (FVC ongoing) and Tsinghua palmprint database (THUPALMLAB). The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed palmprint matching algorithm achieves the state-of-the-art performance. © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2017.