Multimodal biometric user-identification system for network-based applications

The authors describe the design and development of a prototype of a multimodal biometric system for the automatic identification of an individual. Unlike in other proposed multimodal biometric systems, biometric features are acquired from the same image, using a low-cost scanner, at the same time. It makes the system suitable for home and for many network-based applications. After the pre-processing phase, the hand-geometry, finger and palm-print features invariant to hand translation and rotation on the scanner are extracted. Fusion at the matching-score level is obtained by means of the total similarity measure. In the decision module, three rules are used to establish identity. The system was tested on a database of 130 persons. The test performance, FAR=0% and FRR=0.2%, suggests that the system can be used in medium/high-security Internet environments.