A 3D face and hand biometric system for robust user-friendly authentication

A complete authentication system based on fusion of 3D face and hand biometrics is presented and evaluated in this paper. The system relies on a low cost real-time sensor, which can simultaneously acquire a pair of depth and color images of the scene. By combining 2D and 3D facial and hand geometry features, we are able to provide highly reliable user authentication robust to appearance and environmental variations. The design of the proposed system addresses two basic requirements of biometric technologies: dependable performance under real-world conditions along with user convenience. Experimental evaluation on an extensive database recorded in a real working environment demonstrates the superiority of the proposed multimodal scheme against unimodal classifiers in the presence of numerous appearance and environmental variations, thus making the proposed system an ideal solution for a wide range of real-world applications, from high-security to personalization of services and attendance control. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.