Advancements in multimodal biometrics, which amalgamate multiple biometric traits, hold promise for augmenting the accuracy and robustness of biometric identification systems. The focal point of this innovative study is the enhancement of multimodal biometrics identification, using face and iris images as the key biometric traits. This work taps into the expansive collection of face and iris images present in the WVU-Multimodal dataset for evaluation purposes. Our proposed approach employs “Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)” architectures, notable for their efficacy in computer vision tasks, to extract potent discriminative features from the input images. This work specifically incorporates three popular CNN architectures: ResNet-50, InceptionNet, XceptionNet, and fine-tuned CNN. To amalgamate the extracted features, investigate various fusion techniques in the security-centric industry: early fusion, and score-level fusion. Early fusion is an approach that merges the raw images of both face and iris at the input level to a single CNN model. Use the Gabor approach to enhance the image's quality and make the face and iris information more visible. This technique modifies the histogram equalization process for local regions, thus enabling better visibility and subsequent feature extraction. Our experimental evaluation employs performance metrics like accuracy, “Equal Error Rate”, and “Receiver Operating Characteristic” curves. In this work undertakes a comparative analysis to appraise the performance of the different CNN architectures and fusion techniques under scrutiny.
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