International Biometric Group and Michigan State to Develop Multimodal Biometric Systems for DoD

International Biometric Group, LLC (IBG) and Michigan State University were recently awarded a six-month contract by the Department of Defense through the United States Army Research Office's highly competitive STTR Program. The research will help in developing cutting-edge systems that fuse multiple biometric modalities such as iris, face, and fingerprint technologies in operational scenarios.

Accurate identification and verification methods have come under increasing scrutiny in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the release of the 9/11 Commission Report. This has resulted in substantial interest in biometric recognition systems that are being increasingly deployed in a variety of DoD, government and civilian applications; US VISIT is one such very large example.

The IBG team will design experimental systems with customized fusion algorithms to combine the results of multiple biometric products into a single identification and verification decision process. The systems will be tested on live data from IBG's Comparative Biometric Testing efforts which have been collected in the field since 1999.

"These new multimodal systems will leverage the benefits of several technologies to potentially boost performance much beyond what any one given product can currently demonstrate," said Raj Nanavati, Partner at International Biometric Group. "IBG's multimodal research team is excited to join forces with veteran biometric researcher Dr. Anil Jain from Michigan State University."

"Single biometric indicators have to contend with noisy sensor data, restricted degrees of freedom, non-universality of the biometric trait and unacceptable error rates," said Dr. Anil Jain. "Multibiometric systems alleviate these drawbacks, combat spoofing, and increase performance by providing multiple evidences of the same identity."