Evaluation and analysis of a face and voice outdoor multi-biometric system

A biometric sample collected in an uncontrolled outdoor environment varies significantly from its indoor version. Sample variations due to outdoor environmental conditions degrade the performance of biometric systems that otherwise perform well with indoor samples. In this study, we quantitatively evaluate such performance degradation in the case of a face and a voice biometric system. We also investigate how elementary combination schemes involving min–max or z normalization followed by the sum or max fusion rule can improve performance of the multi-biometric system. We use commercial biometric systems to collect face and voice samples from the same subjects in an environment that closely mimics the operational scenario. This realistic evaluation on a dataset of 116 subjects shows that the system performance degrades in outdoor scenarios but by multi-modal score fusion the performance is enhanced by 20%. We also find that max rule fusion performs better than sum rule fusion on this dataset. More interestingly, we see that by using multiple samples of the same biometric modality, the performance of a unimodal system can approach that of a multi-modal system. 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.