Evaluation of independence between palm vein and fingerprint for multimodal biometrics

Multimodal biometrics provides high recognition accuracy and population coverage by combining different biometric sources. However, some multimodal biometrics may obtain smaller-than-expected improvement of recognition accuracy if the combined biometric sources are dependent in terms of a false acceptance by mistakenly perceiving biometric features from two different persons as being from the same person. In this paper, we propose our multimodal biometric prototype that captures a palm vein and three fingerprints simultaneously and we evaluate whether or not their combination is statistically independent. By evaluating false acceptance using the palm vein images and the fingerprint images collected with our prototype, we confirmed that the combination of the palm vein and the fingerprints is almost independent.