Evaluation of serial and parallel multibiometric systems under spoofing attacks

Recent works have investigated the robustness to spoofing attacks of multi-modal biometric systems in parallel fusion mode. Contrary to a common belief, it has been shown that they can be cracked by spoofing only one biometric trait. Robustness evaluation of multi-modal systems in serial fusion mode has not yet been investigated, instead. Thus, the aim of this paper is to comparatively evaluate the robustness of multi-modal systems, in serial and parallel fusion modes, under spoofing attacks. In particular, we empirically investigate the vulnerability of serial and parallel fusion of face and fingerprint biometrics to real spoofing attacks. Our results show that multi-modal systems in both fusion modes are vulnerable to attacks against a single bio-metric trait. On the other hand, they show that the serial fusion mode can attain a favorable trade-off between performance, verification time, and robustness against spoofing attacks.