Preface

Biometric-based person identification continues to gain in importance as institutions of our society come to rely on biometrics to assist with many everyday functions in addition to using biometrics in law enforcement, military and other commercial pursuits. As the uses for biometrics expand, we need to be able to process ever larger amounts of biometric data in the order of millions of data points in order to provide reliable responses to queries. Several large scale applications use multiple biometric traits, such as combination of iris and fingerprint, fingerprint and face, fingerprint and hand geometry for authentication purpose. Consequently, many of the traditional approaches for authentication where the identity of a query template is decided by matching the query template with all stored templates are impractical.

This work is on biometric data indexing for large-scale identification systems with a focus on different biometrics data indexing methods. It provides the state-of-the-art coverage including different biometric traits, together with the pros and cons for each. Discussion of different multimodal fusion strategies are also included. We introduce the reader to unimodal and multimodal biometric traits with large scale biometric data so matching processes can be accomplished in real-time without compromising the accuracy of the identification system. Summary background information on basic concepts, biometric technologies, and advanced research, is also provided. Some of the unique contributions of this work are: showing how to generate index keys from iris, fingerprint and face biometric; generating index keys for multimodal system; proposing new indexing mechanisms; providing iris texture-based indexing technique; minutiae-based fingerprint indexing technique and SURF feature-based face indexing technique; introducing new combining and ranking methods for multimodal biometrics; and, applying hash functions on index keys to extract key points of a query image, and others.

This book would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of many people. We would like to take this opportunity to express our sincere thanks and gratitude to everyone who assisted us along the way. We would like to thank Prof. D. Roy Chowdhury, Prof. M. K. Tiwari, Prof. I. Sengupta, Prof. J. Mukhopadhyay, Dr. K. S. Rao, Dr. S. Misra and Dr. Monalisa Sarma. We wish to convey our special thanks to Sayani, Chandan, Bodhi, Aparna, Debasish, Sayan, Manoj, Pradipta, Soumalya, Santa for their constant support. We also thank all the members of our family. We would like to thank the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur and the Indian Institute of Technology Indore. Finally, we express our sincere thanks to de Gruyter publishing house for the production of the book.

Somnath Dey
Debasis Samanta
June 2014