Biometric Person Recognition

Over the last decade, interest in biometric based identification and verification systems has increased considerably. One application is the use of speech signals, face images or fingerprints in order to supplement security systems based on passwords.§Biometric recognition can also be applied to other areas, such as passport control (immigration checkpoints), forensic work (to determine whether a biometric sample belongs to a suspect) and law enforcement applications (e.g. surveillance). While biometric systems based on face images and/or speech signals can be effective, their performance can degrade in the presence of challenging conditions. In face based systems this can be in the form of a change in the illumination direction and/or face pose variations. Multi-modal systems use more than one biometric at the same time, for two main reasons: to achieve better robustness and to increase discrimination power. This book can serve as a useful primer for face and speech processing, as well as information fusion. It reviews relevant backgrounds and reports research aimed at increasing the robustness of single- and multi-modal biometric identity verification systems.