Multimodal Biometric Authentication Methods: A COTS Approach

We examine the performance of multimodal biometric authentication systems using state-of-the-art Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) fingerprint and face biometrics on a population approaching 1000 individuals. Prior studies of multimodal biometrics have been limited to relatively low accuracy non-COTS systems and populations approximately 10% of this size. Our work is the first to demonstrate that multimodal fingerprint and face biometric systems can achieve significant accuracy gains over either biometric alone, even when using already highly accurate COTS systems on a relatively large-scale population. In addition to examining well-known multimodal methods, we introduce novel methods of fusion and normalization that improve accuracy still further through population analysis.