Current Practices in Information Fusion for Multimodal Biometrics

Integrating different information originating from different sources, known as information fusion, is one of the main factors of designing a biometric system involving more than one biometric source. In this paper, various information fusion techniques in the context of multimodal biometric systems are discussed. Usually, the information in a multimodal biometric system can be combined in senor level, feature extraction level, match score level, rank level, and decision level. There is also another emerging fusion method, which is becoming popular—the fuzzy fusion. Fuzzy fusion deals with the quality of the inputs or with the quality of any system components. This paper discusses the associated challenges related to making the choice of appropriate fusion method for the application domain, to balance between fully automated versus user defined operational parameters of the system and to take the decision on governing rules and weight assignment for fuzzy fusion.