Abstract
[Superseded by SP 800-81 Rev. 1 (April 2010):
http://www.nist.gov/manuscript-publication-search.cfm?pub_id=905113] We examine the performance of multimodal biometric authentication systems using state-of-the-art Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) fingerprint and face biometric systems on a population approaching 1000 individuals. Majority of prior studies of multimodal biometrics have been limited to relatively low accuracy non-COTS systems and populations of a few hundred users. Our work is the first to demonstrate that multimodal fingerprint and face biometric systems can achieve significant accuracy gains over either biometric alone, even when using highly accurate COTS systems on a relatively large-scale population. In addition to examining well-known multimodal methods, we introduce new methods of normalization and fusion that further improve the accuracy.