Multimodal face and fingerprint biometrics authentication on space-limited tokens

This letter presents an efficient multimodal face and fingerprint biometrics authentication system on space-limited tokens, e.g. smart cards, driver license, and RFID cards. Fingerprint templates are encrypted and encoded/embedded into the face images in such a way that the features, which are used in face matching, are not significantly changed during encoding and decoding. As a result, the verification accuracy based on decoded images is similar to that with original images. Experimental and simulation results show that the proposed scheme is an efficient and a cheap solution to the multimodal biometrics authentication on space-limited tokens without degrading the overall decoding and matching performance of the biometrics system. Besides, the proposed system can also be beneficial to cope with the problems of unimodal biometrics systems. (c) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.