An Evaluation of Score Level Fusion Approaches for Fingerprint and Finger-vein Biometrics

Biometric systems have to address many requirements, such as large population coverage, demographic diversity, varied deployment environment, as well as practical aspects like performance and spoofing attacks. Traditional unimodal biometric systems do not fully meet the aforementioned requirements making them vulnerable and susceptible to different types of attacks. In response to that, modern biometric systems combine multiple biometric modalities at different fusion levels. The fused score is decisive to classify an unknown user as a genuine or impostor. In this paper, we evaluate combinations of score normalization and fusion techniques using two modalities (fingerprint and finger-vein) with the goal of identifying which one achieves better improvement rate over traditional unimodal biometric systems. The individual scores obtained from finger-veins and fingerprints are combined at score level using three score normalization techniques (min-max, z-score, hyperbolic tangent) and four score fusion approaches (minimum score, maximum score, simple sum, user weighting). The experimental results proved that the combination of hyperbolic tangent score normalization technique with the simple sum fusion approach achieve the best improvement rate of 99.98%.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, 3 tables, conference, NISK 201

Fingerprint Image-Quality Estimation and its Application to Multialgorithm Verification

Signal-quality awareness has been found to increase recognition rates and to support decisions in multisensor environments significantly. Nevertheless, automatic quality assessment is still an open issue. Here, we study the orientation tensor of fingerprint images to quantify signal impairments, such as noise, lack of structure, blur, with the help of symmetry descriptors. A strongly reduced reference is especially favorable in biometrics, but less information is not sufficient for the approach. This is also supported by numerous experiments involving a simpler quality estimator, a trained method (NFIQ), as well as the human perception of fingerprint quality on several public databases. Furthermore, quality measurements are extensively reused to adapt fusion parameters in a monomodal multialgorithm fingerprint recognition environment. In this study, several trained and nontrained score-level fusion schemes are investigated. A Bayes-based strategy for incorporating experts past performances and current quality conditions, a novel cascaded scheme for computational efficiency, besides simple fusion rules, is presented. The quantitative results favor quality awareness under all aspects, boosting recognition rates and fusing differently skilled experts efficiently as well as effectively (by training).Comment: Published at IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Securit

Review of Multimodal Biometric Identification Using Hand Feature and Face

In the era of Information Technology, openness of the information is a major concern. As the confidentiality and integrity of the information is critically important, it has to be secured from unauthorized access. Security refers to prohibit some unauthorized persons from some important data or from some precious assets. So we need accurateness on automatic personal identification in various applications such as ATM, driving license, passports, citizen's card, cellular telephones, voter's ID card etc. Unimodal system carries some problems such as Noise in sensed data, Intra-class variations, Inter-class similarities, Non-universality and Spoof attacks. The accuracy of system is improved by combining different biometric traits which are called multimodal. This system gives more accuracy as it would be difficult for imposter to spoof multiple biometric traits simultaneously. This paper reviews different methods for fusion of biometric traits

Fingerabdruckswachstumvorhersage, Bildvorverarbeitung und Multi-level Judgment Aggregation

Im ersten Teil dieser Arbeit wird Fingerwachstum untersucht und eine Methode zur Vorhersage von Wachstum wird vorgestellt. Die Effektivität dieser Methode wird mittels mehrerer Tests validiert. Vorverarbeitung von Fingerabdrucksbildern wird im zweiten Teil behandelt und neue Methoden zur Schätzung des Orientierungsfelds und der Ridge-Frequenz sowie zur Bildverbesserung werden vorgestellt: Die Line Sensor Methode zur Orientierungsfeldschätzung, gebogene Regionen zur Ridge-Frequenz-Schätzung und gebogene Gabor Filter zur Bildverbesserung. Multi-level Jugdment Aggregation wird eingeführt als Design Prinzip zur Kombination mehrerer Methoden auf mehreren Verarbeitungsstufen. Schließlich wird Score Neubewertung vorgestellt, um Informationen aus der Vorverarbeitung mit in die Score Bildung einzubeziehen. Anhand eines Anwendungsbeispiels wird die Wirksamkeit dieses Ansatzes auf den verfügbaren FVC-Datenbanken gezeigt.Finger growth is studied in the first part of the thesis and a method for growth prediction is presented. The effectiveness of the method is validated in several tests. Fingerprint image preprocessing is discussed in the second part and novel methods for orientation field estimation, ridge frequency estimation and image enhancement are proposed: the line sensor method for orientation estimation provides more robustness to noise than state of the art methods. Curved regions are proposed for improving the ridge frequency estimation and curved Gabor filters for image enhancement. The notion of multi-level judgment aggregation is introduced as a design principle for combining different methods at all levels of fingerprint image processing. Lastly, score revaluation is proposed for incorporating information obtained during preprocessing into the score, and thus amending the quality of the similarity measure at the final stage. A sample application combines all proposed methods of the second part and demonstrates the validity of the approach by achieving massive verification performance improvements in comparison to state of the art software on all available databases of the fingerprint verification competitions (FVC)

Mixing Biometric Data For Generating Joint Identities and Preserving Privacy

Biometrics is the science of automatically recognizing individuals by utilizing biological traits such as fingerprints, face, iris and voice. A classical biometric system digitizes the human body and uses this digitized identity for human recognition. In this work, we introduce the concept of mixing biometrics. Mixing biometrics refers to the process of generating a new biometric image by fusing images of different fingers, different faces, or different irises. The resultant mixed image can be used directly in the feature extraction and matching stages of an existing biometric system. In this regard, we design and systematically evaluate novel methods for generating mixed images for the fingerprint, iris and face modalities. Further, we extend the concept of mixing to accommodate two distinct modalities of an individual, viz., fingerprint and iris. The utility of mixing biometrics is demonstrated in two different applications. The first application deals with the issue of generating a joint digital identity. A joint identity inherits its uniqueness from two or more individuals and can be used in scenarios such as joint bank accounts or two-man rule systems. The second application deals with the issue of biometric privacy, where the concept of mixing is used for de-identifying or obscuring biometric images and for generating cancelable biometrics. Extensive experimental analysis suggests that the concept of biometric mixing has several benefits and can be easily incorporated into existing biometric systems

A Review of Fingerprint Feature Representations and Their Applications for Latent Fingerprint Identification: Trends and Evaluation

Latent fingerprint identification is attracting increasing interest because of its important role in law enforcement. Although the use of various fingerprint features might be required for successful latent fingerprint identification, methods based on minutiae are often readily applicable and commonly outperform other methods. However, as many fingerprint feature representations exist, we sought to determine if the selection of feature representation has an impact on the performance of automated fingerprint identification systems. In this paper, we review the most prominent fingerprint feature representations reported in the literature, identify trends in fingerprint feature representation, and observe that representations designed for verification are commonly used in latent fingerprint identification. We aim to evaluate the performance of the most popular fingerprint feature representations over a common latent fingerprint database. Therefore, we introduce and apply a protocol that evaluates minutia descriptors for latent fingerprint identification in terms of the identification rate plotted in the cumulative match characteristic (CMC) curve. From our experiments, we found that all the evaluated minutia descriptors obtained identification rates lower than 10% for Rank-1 and 24% for Rank-100 comparing the minutiae in the database NIST SD27, illustrating the need of new minutia descriptors for latent fingerprint identification.This work was supported in part by the National Council of Science and Technology of Mexico (CONACYT) under Grant PN-720 and Grant 63894