Fusion of Multimodal Biometrics

Slides (pdf)  Size: 12.3MB

Abstract

Person’s identity can be recognised or verified using different biometric traits, which in general offer unique characteristics and, therefore, support preferred areas of applicability. However, multiple biometric traits can also be used jointly to take advantage of the complementary information about the subject they convey. This potentially has many benefits, including improved performance, increased population coverage, extended range of environmental conditions in which biometric authentication can be performed, and enhanced resilience to spoofing. The lecture will introduce the fundamental principles of multibiometrics. The problem of multimodal biometrics fusion will be formulated in the Bayesian statistical framework, setting out the differences between signal, feature, score and decision level fusion. The different fusion approaches lead to distinct fusion architectures.

The role of score normalisation and of biometric trait quality will then be discussed in the context of score level fusion. The process of multimodal biometric fusion will be illustrated on several examples, including the fusion of visual appearance and verbal appearance description for person re-identification using soft biometrics.

Biography

I have been a Research Assistant in the Engineering Department of Cambridge University (1973--75), SERC Research Fellow at the University of Southampton (1975-77), Royal Society European Research Fellow, Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommuninations, Paris (1977--78), IBM Research Fellow, Balliol College, Oxford (1978--80), Principal Research Associate, SERC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (1980--84) and Principal Scientific Officer, SERC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (1985).

I also worked as the SERC Coordinator for Pattern Analysis (1982), and was Rutherford Research Fellow in Oxford University, Dept. Engineering Science (1985).

I joined the Department of Electrical Engineering of Surrey University in 1986 as a Reader in Information Technology, and became Professor of Machine Intelligence in 1991 and gained the title Distinguished Professor in 2004.

Josef Kittler
University of Surrey, UK