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.