Some issues on choices of modalities for multimodal biometric systems

Biometrics-based authentication has advantages over other mechanisms, but there are several variabilities and vulnerabilities that need to be addressed. No single modality or combinations of modalities can be applied universally that is best for all applications. This paper deliberates different combinations of physiological biometric modalities with different levels of fusion. In our experiments, we have selected Face, Palmprint, Finger Knuckle Print, Iris, and Handvein modalities. All themodalities are of image type and publicly available, comprising at least 100 users. Proper selection of modalities for fusion can yield desired level of performance. Through our experiments it is learnt that a multimodal system which is considered just by increasing number of modalities by fusion would not yield the desired level of performance. Many alternate options for increased performance are presented

Multimodal biometric fusion of face and palmprint at various levels

Recent years have witnessed researchers paying enormous attention to design efficient multi-modal biometric systems because of their ability to withstand spoof attacks. Single biometric sometimes fails to extract adequate information for verifying the identity of a person 7. On the other hand, by combining multiple modalities, enhanced performance reliability could be achieved. In this paper, we have fused face and palmprint modalities at all levels of fusion viz sensor level, feature level, decision level and score level. For this purpose, we have selected modality specific feature extraction algorithms for face and palmprint such as LDA and LPQ respectively. Popular databases AR (for face) and PolyU (for Palmprint) were considered for evaluation purposes. Rigorous experiments were conducted both under clean and noisy conditions to ascertain robust level of fusion and impact of fusion strategies at various levels of fusion for these two modalities. Results are substantiated with appropriate analysis