Integrating faces and fingerprints for personal identification

An automatic personal identification system based solely on fingerprints or faces is often not able to meet the system performance requirements. Face recognition is fast but not extremely reliable, while fingerprint verification is reliable but inefficient in database retrieval. We have developed a prototype biometric system which integrates faces and fingerprints. The system overcomes the limitations of face recognition systems as well as fingerprint verification systems. The integrated prototype system operates in the identification mode with an admissible response time. The identity established by the system is more reliable than the identity established by a face recognition system. In addition, the proposed decision fusion scheme enables performance improvement by integrating multiple cues with different confidence measures. Experimental results demonstrate that our system performs very well. It meets the response time as well as the accuracy requirements.