When Fingerprints Are Combined with Iris - A Case Study: FVC2004 and CASIA

This paper presents novel studies on fusion strategies for personal identification using fingerprint and iris biometrics. The purpose of our paper is to investigate whether the integration of iris and fingerprint biometrics can achieve performance that may not be possible using a single biometric technology. Moreover we are interested in evaluating the correlation among the best state of art algorithms for fingerprint verification presented at FVC2004. We show that the fusion among some competitors of FVC2004 permits a drastically reduction of the performance. Particularly interesting is the result obtained by combining the competitors of FVC2004 and an IRIS matcher in terms of EER (the most used parameter in the evaluation of real identification systems), significantly lower than for other approaches. This indicates that the intrinsic error of the system is very low and tends to 0 for some of the tests carried out. The results of this paper confirm that a multimodal biometric can overcome some of the limitations of a single biometric resulting in a substantial performance improvement.