Soft-computing methods for robust authentication using soft-biometric data

Biometrics is the measurement of person’s physiological or behavioral characteristics. It enables authentication of a person’s identity using such measurements. Biometric-based authentication is thus becoming increasingly important in computer-based applications because the amount of sensitive data stored in such systems is growing. Particularly challenging is the implementation of biometric-based authentication in embedded computer system applications, because the resources of such systems are scarce. Reliability and performance are two primary requirements to be satisfied in embedded system applications. Single-mode and hard-feature-based biometrics do not offer enough reliability and performance to satisfy such requirements. Multimode biometrics is a primary level of improvement. Soft-biometric features can thus be considered along with hard-biometric features to further improve performance. A combination of soft-computing methods and soft-biometric data can yield more improvements in authentication performance by limiting requirements for memory and processing power. The multi-biometric approach also increases system reliability, since most embedded systems can capture more than one physiological or behavioral characteristic. A multi-biometric platform that combines voiceprint and fingerprint authentication was developed as a reference model to demonstrate the potential of soft-computing methods and soft-biometric data. Hard-computing pattern-matching algorithms were applied to match hard-biometric features. Artificial neural network (ANN) processing was applied to match soft-biometric features. Both hard-computing and soft-computing matching results are inferred by a fuzzy logic engine to perform smart authentication using a decision-fusion paradigm. The embedded implementation was based on a single-chip, floating-point, digital signal processor (DSP) to demonstrate the practical embeddability of such an approach and the improved performance that can be attained despite limited system resources.