(IJCSIS) International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security,

Biometric recognition systems have advanced significantly in the last decade and their use in specific applications will increase in the near future. The ability to conduct meaningful comparisons and assessments will be crucial to successful deployment and increasing biometric adoption. The best modality used as unimodal biometric systems are unable to fully address the problem of higher recognition rate. Multimodal biometric systems are able to mitigate some of the limitations encountered in unimodal biometric systems, such as non-universality, distinctiveness, non-acceptability, noisy sensor data, spoof attacks, and performance. More reliable recognition accuracy and performance are achievable as different modalities were being combined together and different algorithms or techniques were being used. The work presented in this paper focuses on a bimodal biometric system using face and fingerprint. An image enhancement technique (histogram equalization) is used to enhance the face and fingerprint images. Salient features of the face and fingerprint were extracted using the Gabor filter technique. A dimensionality reduction technique was carried out on both images extracted features using a principal component analysis technique. A feature level fusion algorithm (Mahalanobis distance technique) is used to combine each unimodal feature together. The performance of the proposed approach is validated and is effective.