Multimodal Biometric Authentication Using Fingerprint and Iris Recognition in Identity Management

The majority of deployed biometric systems today use information from a single biometric technology for verification or identification. Large-scale biometric systems have to address additional demands such as larger population coverage and demographic diversity, varied deployment environment, and more demanding performance requirements. Today´s single modality biometric systems are finding it difficult to meet these demands, and a solution is to integrate additional sources of information to strengthen the decision process. A multibiometric system combines information from multiple biometric traits, algorithms, sensors, and other components to make a recognition decision. Besides improving the accuracy, the fusion of biometrics has several advantages such as increasing population coverage, deterring spoofing activities and reducing enrolment failure. The last 5 years have seen an exponential growth in research and commercialization activities in this area, and this trend is likely to continue. Therefore, here we propose a novel multimodal biometric authentication approach fusing iris and fingerprint traits at score-level. We principally explore the fusion of iris and fingerprint biometrics and their potential application as biometric identifiers. The individual comparison scores obtained from the iris and fingerprints are combined at score-level using a three score normalization techniques (Min-Max, Z-Score, Hyperbolic Tangent) and four score fusion approaches (Minimum Score, Maximum Score Simple Sum and User Weighting). The fused-score is utilized to classify an unknown user into the genuine or impostor.