Decision-level fusion in fingerprint verification

A scheme is proposed for classifier combination at decision level which stresses the importance of classifier selection during combination. The proposed scheme is optimal (in the Neyman-Pearson sense) when sufficient data are available to obtain reasonable estimates of the join densities of classifier outputs. Four different fingerprint matching algorithms are combined using the proposed scheme to improve the accuracy of a fingerprint verification system. Experiments conducted on a large fingerprint database (similar to 2700 fingerprints) confirm the effectiveness of the proposed integration scheme. An overall matching performance increase of similar to 3% is achieved. We further show that a combination of multiple impressions or multiple fingers improves the verification performance by more than 4% and 5%, respectively. Analysis of the results provide some insight into the various decision-level classifier combination strategies. (C) 2002 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.