Multimodal biometric databases: an overview

The interest on biometric recognition systems for person authentication has experienced an important growth in the last decade. One of the key factors of this success is the availability of biometric databases; these are of utmost importance to define common benchmarks that enable consistent comparison of competing recognition strategies. The design, acquisition, and collection of these databases are one of the most time- and resource-consuming tasks for the research community, especially in the case of multimodal databases including multiple biometric traits and acquisition sessions. In this paper, the most important multimodal biometric databases publicly available are summarized, and the contents of some new multimodal databases under development are outlined