QPLC: A novel multimodal biometric score fusion method

Abstract

In biometrics authentication systems, it has been shown that fusion of more than one modality (e.g., face and finger) and fusion of more than one classifier (two different algorithms) can improve the system performance. Often a score level fusion is adopted as this approach doesn't require the vendors to reveal much about their algorithms and features. Many score level transformations have been proposed in the literature to normalize the scores which enable fusion of more than one classifier. In this paper, we propose a novel score level transformation technique that helps in fusion of multiple classifiers. The method is based on two components: quantile transform of the genuine and impostor score distributions and a power transform which further changes the score distribution to help linear classification. After the scores are normalized using the novel quantile power transform, several linear classifiers are proposed to fuse the scores of multiple classifiers. Using the NIST BSSR-1 dataset, we have shown that the results obtained by the proposed method far exceed the results published so far in the literature. © 2010 IEEE.