Integrating Faces and Fingerprints for Personal Identiication

An automatic personal identiication system based solely on ngerprints or faces is often not able to meet the system performance requirements. Face recognition is fast but not reliable while ngerprint veriication is reliable but ineecient in database retrieval. We have developed a prototype biometric system which integrates faces and ngerprints. The system overcomes the limitations of face recognition systems as well as ngerprint veriication systems. The integrated prototype system operates in the identiication mode with an admissible response time. The identity established by the system is more reliable than the identity established by a face recognition system. In addition, the proposed decision fusion schema enables performance improvement by integrating multiple cues with diierent conndence measures. Experimental results demonstrate that our system performs very well. It meets the response time as well as the accuracy requirements.