Trends and Challenges in Mono and Multi Biometrics

Several systems require authenticating a person's identity before giving access to resources. Biometrics has long been known as a robust approach for person authentication. However, most monomodal biometrics are proven to exhibit one or more weaknesses. In this respect, evidence reconciliation from different biometric systems (referred to as multibiometrics) has attracted much attention lately. Multibiometric systems combine the information presented by multiple biometric sensors, algorithms, samples, units, or traits. In addition to improving recognition accuracy, these systems are expected to improve population coverage, reduce spoofing and be resilient to fault tolerance of different monomodal biometric systems. Here, we present an overview of the different biometric systems, enumerate the advantages and weaknesses of such systems, and some of the newly introduced biometrics. We then discuss the various sources of biometric information that can be combined as well as the different levels of fusion in a multibiometric system. It is becoming increasingly evident that multibiometric systems will be the technology for person identification in the 21st century.