Title: Why rank-level fusion? And what is the impact of image quality?

Authors: Emanuela Marasco; Ayman Abaza; Bojan Cukic

Addresses: Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, West Virginia University, P.O. Box 6109 Morgantown, WV, USA ' West Virginia High Technology Consortium Foundation, 1000 Technology Drive, Suite 1000, Fairmont, WV, USA; Biomedical Engineering Department, Cairo University, Giza, Egypt ' Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 9201 University City Blvd. Charlotte, NC 28223-0001, USA

Abstract: Recent research has established benefits of rank-level fusion in identification systems; however, these studies have not compared the advantages, if any, of rank-level fusion schemes over classical score-level fusion schemes. In the presence of low quality biometric data, the genuine match score is claimed to be low and expected to be an unreliable individual output. Conversely, the rank assigned to that genuine identity is believed to remain stable even when using low quality biometric data. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is not a deepen investigation on the stability of ranks. The contribution of this paper is two-fold: 1) investigating the rank stability in both unimodal and multimodal biometric systems; 2) comparing the identification performance of rank-level and score-level fusion in the presence of low quality data. The results show that a variant of the highest rank fusion scheme, performs better than other tested non-learning rank-level fusion methods.

Keywords: multi-biometrics; rank-level fusion; biometric image quality; biometrics; rank stability; identification performance; score-level fusion; low quality data.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBDI.2015.069097

International Journal of Big Data Intelligence, 2015 Vol.2 No.2, pp.106 - 116

Received: 11 Oct 2014
Accepted: 04 Dec 2014
Published online: 09 May 2015 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article