Multiple Biometrics

Authentication is undoubtedly an important task for all systems providing a component responsible for the interaction between humans and computers. Traditional authentication techniques like PINs, passwords or ID cards show significant drawbacks: they might be forgotten, misplaced or lost, or even stolen, copied or forged. Biometrics use physical or behavioral characteristics to verify the identity of a person and thus overcome these problems. In this respect, biometric technology may be easier and more comfortable to use. First, a short overview of biometric technology in general is given. Then, the main part of this chapter explains the biometric technologies integrated in the SmartKom system. In particular, a new approach to combine several biometrics in a multimodal device is presented. The performance of this proposed combination method is shown to be superior to that of the single biometric subsystems.