Multimedia Sensor Fusion for Retrieving Identity in Biometric Access Control Systems

In this article, we propose a novel multimedia sensor fusion approach based on heterogeneous sensors for biometric access control applications. The proposed fusion technique uses multiple acoustic and visual sensors for extracting dominant biometric cues, and combines them with nondominant cues. The performance evaluation of the proposed fusion protocol and a novel cascaded authentication approach using a 3D stereovision database shows a significant improvement in performance and robustness, with equal error rates of 42.9% (audio only), 32% (audio + 3D face+ 2D lip features), 15% (audio + 3D face+ 2D eye features), and 7.3% (audio-3D face+2D lip +2D eye-eyebrows) respectively.