A Comparative Study of Multimodal Biometric Authentication System: A Review

With the advancement in communication technologies mobile phones, smart phones and tablets have become an integral part of our lives. These devices store call details, contacts, messages, photographs and other personal data of the owner. Moreover, services like mobile banking and mobile health monitoring involve data that requires protection from unauthorized parties. Added to this, a host of sophisticated attacks are possible that attempt to steal identity of the user and vital information from the device. Verification of the owner and authentication of the user of mobile service are two prime issues requiring immediate attention and technological solutions. Biometric based verification and authentication provide an optimal tradeoff between security and user convenience for this purpose. Present day smart phones and tablets are equipped with multiple sensors that help to register the biometric without any inconvenience. There are a number of emerging options for biometric authentication via mobile phone, e.g. fingerprint or face recognition via camera functions, voice recognition via microphone, gait or activity recognition via accelerometer and/or gyroscope and gesture recognition via camera, accelerometer and gyroscope. Also, for more secure applications & services, multimodal biometrics should be used to provide the desired level of assurance. This paper explores biometric features that are suitable for mobile devices in terms of ease of registration, data processing capability for matching, hardware support, accuracy level, etc. and suggests improvement of verification and authentication by combining together two biometric techniques. For owner verification, possible user friendly combinations are finger based signature (shape, pressure, velocity) on the touch screen along with fingerprint, gait along with fingerprint and voice along with breath/body odour. For authentication applications, fingerprint along with iris seems to be the most secure combination and can be customized for a smart phone. Other suitable options are voice along with fingerprint, activity detection along with fingerprint and face along with voice (both biometric features can be registered almost simultaneously, particularly with the available multi-core hardware support).