A feature-level fusion based improved multimodal biometric recognition system using ear and profile face

Ear based identity recognition subject to uncontrolled conditions such as illumination changes, pose variation, low contrast, partial occlusion and noise, is an active research area in the field of biometrics. Meanwhile, multimodal biometrics is becoming increasingly popular and offers improved performance due to the use of multiple sources of information. In this paper, a multimodal biometrics system is proposed based on the ear and profile face that not only alleviates the short-comings of ear biometrics but also improves the overall recognition rate. The ear and profile face modalities are first represented individually using the combination of two efficient local feature descriptors namely, local phase quantization (LPQ) and local directional patterns (LDP). These histogram-based local descriptors are then combined into a high-dimensional feature vector that preserves complementary information in both frequency and spatial domains. The PCA along with the z-score normalization technique is independently applied on each feature vector and the resultant reduced feature vectors are combined at the feature level. The kernel discriminative common vector (KDCV) approach is finally exploited over the combined feature set to derive more discriminative and non-linear features for the identification of individuals using kNN classifier. The effectiveness of the proposed model has been verified with the deep features derived from three popular pre-trained CNN models such as AlexNet, VGG16 and GoogleNet. Experimental results on two benchmark databases clearly show that the proposed approach achieves better performance than individual modality and other state-of-the-art methods.