USER AUTHENTICATION USING FUSION OF FACE AND PALMPRINT

This paper presents a new method of personal authentication using face and palmprint images. The facial and palmprint images can be simultaneously acquired by using a pair of digital camera and integrated to achieve higher confidence in personal authentication. The proposed method of fusion uses a feed-forward neural network to integrate individual matching scores and generate a combined decision score. The significance of the proposed method is more than improving performance for bimodal system. Our method uses the claimed identity of users as a feature for fusion. Thus the required weights and bias on individual biometric matching scores are automatically computed to achieve the best possible performance. The experimental results also demonstrate that Sum, Max, and Product rule can be used to achieve significant performance improvement when consolidated matching scores are employed instead of direct matching scores. The fusion strategy used in this paper outperforms even its existing facial and palmprint modules. The performance indices for personal authentication system using two-class separation criterion functions have been analyzed and evaluated. The method proposed in this paper can be extended for any multimodal authentication system to achieve higher performance.