Biometric source weighting in multi-biometric fusion: Towards a generalized and robust solution

This work presents a new weighting algorithm for biometric sources within a score-level multi-biometric system. Those weights are used in the effective and widely used weighted sum fusion rule to produce multi-biometric decisions. The presented solution is mainly based on the characteristic of the overlap region between the genuine and imposter scores distributions. It also integrates the performance of the biometric source represented by its equal error rate. This solution aims at avoiding the shortcomings of previously proposed solutions such as low generalization abilities and sensitiveness to outliers. The proposed solution is evaluated along with the state of the art and best practice techniques. The evaluation was performed on two databases, the Biometric Scores Set BSSR1 and the Extended Multi Modal Verification for Teleservices and Security applications database and a satisfying and stable performance was achieved.