Multimodal biometrics with serial, parallel and hierarchical mode at decision level fusion

Abstract

Biometric based personal authentication is playing a vital role in various security based applications. This paper presents the effective fusion of fingerprint, palmprint and iris traits at decision level. Combining different traits at the decision level is a challenging task due to less information available at this level. The focus of the work is to examine the performance of multimodal biometrics at decision level fusion in three different i.e. serial, parallel and hierarchical modes of operation. Serial mode is performed by taking unimodals serially while parallel mode of operation is carried out by processing all modals simulatenously using Majority Voting Rule and the hierarchical mode of operation is performed with proper combination of traits in parallel and serial mode using AND and OR rule. The experiments are performed on 100 different users from publically available FVC2006 fingerprint database, CASIA V1 palmprint database and IITD iris database. The experimental results suggest that proper fusion of different traits in hierarchical way can give best performance even at decision level fusion as compared to serial and parallel mode of operation.