Chapter 14
Building a Multi-biometric System

Template matching techniques are a key ingredient in many computer vision systems, ranging from quality control to object recognition systems among which biometric identification systems have today a prominent position. Among biometric systems, those based on face recognition have been the subject of extensive research. This popularity is due to many factors, from the non invasiveness of the technique, to the high expectations due to the widely held belief that human face recognition mechanisms perform flawlessly. Building a face recognition system from the ground up is a complex task and this chapter addresses all the required practical steps: preprocessing issues, feature scoring, the integration of multiple features and modalities, and the final classification stage.

keywords: image normalization, speaker identification, score integration, verification, face recognition, hierarchical matching, robust similarity measures.