MorphoAccess® VP Series - User Guide
Section 1:
Introduction
SSE-0000082427-01
M
ORPHO DOCUMENT
.
R
EPRODUCTION AND
D
ISCLOSURE
P
ROHIBITED
14
January 2011
Multimodality and its advantages
Performances in terms of accuracy (characterized by the FRR @FAR ratio) remain one
of the main challenges of the biometric industry.
But once a biometric technology has reached maturity, time and efforts in research
required to carry out improvements to the performances (e.g. by refining algorithms)
are significant. For instance, NIST benchmarks about fingerprint recognition
technology show that in the case of state of the art algorithms, it takes years to gain
one point of accuracy.
Thus, various alternative approaches apart from the refinement of one isolated
technology have been considered.
The first one consists in using several instances of the same biometric trait (e.g. the 10
fingers of one individual as in AFIS systems). This technique is known as multi-
biometrics or multi-instances.
It leads to improvements but acquisition phase and processing time are considerably
increased, resulting in low cost efficiency (without mentioning the fact that
universality is not guaranteed: for instance, not everyone presents 10 usable fingers).
Another way is to use several algorithms to process the same set of biometric data
(multi-algorithms approach). This method is only efficient when applied to algorithms
which do not show good performances by themselves and is also processing time
consuming.
In the recent years, biometric industry turned to an innovative approach –
Multimodality – which consists in combining one biometrics with another
complementary one. The reason is that upstream studies showed that it could increase
performances to a much larger extent than any of the other approaches considered until
then. It is particularly accomplished when the two sets of biometric data are captured
and processed at the same time, with one sole device.
Morpho has been a pioneer in this field, betting very early in the combination of
fingerprint and finger vein recognition technologies. Morpho indeed regarded these
two technologies as particularly adapted for an efficient fusion:
•
they are mature, stable and above all independent one from the other.
•
they can be captured together using one unique sensing device which do not
necessitate any challenging technological evolution and thus preserves cost
efficiency.
•
the same ergonomics of acquisition as the one of the fingerprint capture can be
applied, which has been widely and well adopted for its easiness of use.
After having enlisted the cooperation of Hitachi – for its perfect command of the finger
vein imaging technology – Morpho developed the first ever multimodal finger vein
and fingerprint device, now distributed on the market as the MorphoAccess® VP
Series.
The assets of the MorphoAccess® VP Series are numerous:
•
it is capable to address those individuals who usually experiment difficulties to
enroll on a mono-modal device (multimodal Failure To Enroll rate is close to the
product of the two mono-modal FTE)
