Multimodal Biometric Person Authentication : A Review

Abstract

This paper provides a review of multimodal biometric person authentication systems. The paper begins with an introduction to biometrics, its advantages, disadvantages, and authentication system using them. A brief discussion on the selection criteria of different biometrics is also given. This is followed by a discussion on the classification of biometric systems, their strengths, and limitations. Detailed descriptions on the multimodal biometric person authentication system, different modes of operation, and integration scenarios are also provided. Considering the importance of information fusion in multi-biometric approach, a separate section is dedicated on the different levels of fusion, which include sensor-level, feature-level, score-level, rank-level, and abstract-level fusions, and also different rules of fusion. This paper also presents an overview of some performance parameters and error rates for biometric person authentication systems. A separate section is devoted to the recent trends in biometrics field, namely, adaptive biometric system, analysis of complementary and supplementary information, and physiological biometrics. The paper concludes with a discussion on the issues that are currently holding the deployment of multimodal biometric person authentication systems and a possible scope for future work.