From Single Biometrics to Multi-Biometrics
In the past decades while biometrics attracts increasing attention of researchers, people also have found that the biometric system using a single biometric trait may not satisfy the demand of some real-world applications. Diversity of biometric traits also means that they may have different performance such as accuracy and reliability. Multi-biometric applications emerging in recent years are a big progress of biometrics. They can overcome some shortcomings of the single biometric system and can perform well in improving the system performance. In this chapter we describe a number of definitions on biometrics, categories and fusion strategies of multi-biometrics as well as the performance evaluation on the biometric system. The first section of this chapter describes some concepts, motivation and justification of multi-biometrics. Section 12.2 provides some definitions and notations of biometric and multi-biometric technologies. Section 12.3 is mainly related to performance evaluation of various types of biometric systems. Section 12.4 briefly presents research and development of multi-biometrics.