Systematic Error Analysis for the Enhancement of Biometric Systems Using Soft Biometrics

This letter presents a novel probabilistic framework for augmenting the recognition performance of biometric systems with information from continuous soft biometric (SB) traits. In particular, by modelling the systematic error induced by the estimation of the SB traits, a modified efficient recognition probability can be extracted including information related both to the hard and SB traits. The proposed approach is applied without loss of generality in the case of gait recognition, where two state-of-the-art gait recognition systems are considered as hard biometrics and the height and stride length of the individuals are considered as SBs. Experimental validation on two known, large datasets illustrates significant advances in the recognition performance with respect to both identification and authentication rates.