On-the-move Multimodal Biometric Recognition

Biometric recognition systems are nowadays one of the most used ways to validate an individual's identity. As such, they are naturally among the main candidates to be used in contexts with high-security requirements, such as those associated with border control, as in airports. Traditionally, the traits employed for such purpose include fingerprints and facial images, with the recent addition of iris. Yet, to ensure the ever greater security of such systems and greater ease of use, solutions based on novel traits and innovative modalities of acquisition of the already employed characteristics are highly desired. Within this context, this chapter illustrates a reliable, low-cost, and convenient solution designed and deployed to perform security checks within an airport. The presented approach relies on a multimodal biometric recognition system exploiting face traits to trigger the recognition process at a distance and subcutaneous vein patterns to guarantee the desired robustness against malicious spoofing attempts. Furthermore, the implemented system requires users to have only minimal interaction with it, having been designed to enable an on-the-move recognition modality, where subjects do not need to stop at a gate to provide the data upon which the recognition process has to be carried out since the interested characteristics can be captured. In contrast, users continue to walk, thus increasing the system throughput and the passengers' convenience. The design of the proposed acquisition device, the characteristics of employed processing boards, and the algorithms developed to perform the acquisition of the interested biometric traits, as well as to carry out the recognition process, are outlined in the chapter.