Multispectral palmprint recognition system (MPRS) is an essential technology for effective human identification and verification tasks. To improve the accuracy and performance of MPRS, a novel approach based on autoencoder (AE) and regularized extreme learning machine (RELM) is proposed in this paper. The proposed approach is intended to make the recognition faster by reducing the number of palmprint features without degrading the accuracy of classifier. To achieve this objective, first, the region of interest (ROI) from palmprint images is extracted by David Zhang's method. Second, an efficient normalized Gist (NGist) descriptor is used for palmprint feature extraction. Then, the dimensionality of extracted features is reduced using optimized AE. Finally, the reduced features are fed to the RELM for classification. A comprehensive set of experiments are conducted on the benchmark MS-PolyU dataset. The results were significantly high compared to the state-of-the-art approaches, and the robustness and efficiency of the proposed approach are revealed.