What Is Multimodal Biometric Authentication?People are beginning to be more and more worried about identity theft, and they want to make sure that their identities are safe and that other people will not be able to use them. This requires companies to start using more secure ways to identify people and make sure that people are who they say they are when they are accessing sensitive information or making financial transactions. One of the most secure methods of identity verification is multimodal biometric authentication. Biometric authentication is more secure than many other forms of authentication because biometric identifiers like fingerprints, voice patterns, facial images, iris and retina scans, and they way we sign our signatures are very unique to individuals and very difficult to fake or copy. However, there are sometimes false positives or false negatives even using these forms of authentication. These false positives and false negatives can be further minimized by the use of multimodal biometric authentication, where more than one biometric is used for authentication. Currently most systems on the market for biometric authentication use only a single biometric for identification and verification, but research is being done into the best ways to create multimodal biometric authentication systems. Research has been done on multimodal biometric authentication systems that use a combination of fingerprints and facial images, voice and face biometrics, and a combination of face, fingerprint, and hand geometry biometrics. In order to use mutimodal biometric authentication, it needs to be determined which methods of combining the different types of biometric date works best and results in the most accurate authentications. Which method of combining the data works best depends in part on the situations in which the multimodal biometric authentication is going to be used. In situations where the same group people are always using the system, there are methods that can improve the accuracy of the system as it can get used to the normal variation in the biometrics of the people involved. However, other methods of combining the results of the different biometric data used in multimodal biometric authentication work better when the people who are being identified with the system are constantly changing and not always known ahead of time, such as those going through immigration checkpoints. Once the use of biometric authentication becomes more common and research into multimodal biometric authentication determines the best ways to combine biometric information these types of systems will become more common.
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