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A novel, algorithm metadata-aware architecture for biometric systems

Conference Paper · September 2012

DOI: 10.1109/BIOMS.2012.6345771

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Vassiliki Andronikou Stefanos Xefteris

Nodalpoint Systems University of Western Macedonia
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 A Novel, Algorithm metadata-aware
Architecture for Biometric Systems
Vassiliki Andronikou, Stefanos Xefteris, Theodora Varvarigou
Electrical and Computer Engineering School,
National Technical University of Athens
Athens, Greece
{vandro, xefteris}@mail.ntua.gr, dora@telecom.ntua.gr

Introduction

Rapidly increasing citizens’ mobility across countries, international security breaches and
financial fraud pose a growing demand for large-scale efficient and effective identity
management. The innate characteristics of biometrics, including uniqueness, universality,
distinctiveness, and permanence, along with the fact that they are tightly bound to their
holder, give to biometric systems a substantial advantage over currently prevailing methods
of person identification and verification, such as smart cards, passwords, and so on. In fact,
biometrics show great potential in offering a sound large-scale solution. Nevertheless,
performance and reliability of today’s biometric systems still fail to meet the requirements
posed by their large-scale deployment; acceptable levels of accuracy, high demands on
throughput, real-time service provision, privacy (both from the legal and ethical
perspective), wide population coverage and scalability, among others.

In order to address the aforementioned challenges, fervent research is taking place, targeted
on various aspects of biometric systems; sensor development and improvement,
advancement of feature extraction algorithms as well as improved/novel classification
algorithms among others. This fact is also reflected on the current shift towards multi-
biometric systems. In an effort to eliminate limitations stemming from uni-biometric
systems, such as poor population coverage and high failure-to-enroll rates, multi-biometric
systems aim at fusing information from a variety of sources. These sources may include
multiple samples, sensors, features, modalities and algorithms [1]. Still, these systems are
bound by the limitations of the individual sensors’, features and algorithms which have been
incorporated and show limited – if any – flexibility and adaptability. In other words, the
rather static set of sensors and algorithms deployed within a specific biometric system and
their unconditioned usage across the submitted biometric samples comprise determining
factors for the performance and reliability of the biometric system.

Objectives

The main objective of this paper is to present a novel process flow and a resulting advanced
architecture for biometric systems which follows the key principles of Service Oriented
Architectures (SOA) and allows for system adaptability and scalability; two major
requirements for large-scale deployment of such systems. Within this context, a set of new
and enhanced components required for the realization of this approach is presented.
Proposed Approach

A typical biometric system architecture includes 5 main sub-systems; namely, data

acquisition, signal processing, data storage, comparison and decision, with the last two ones
often being one. These subsystems actually depict the different steps followed within a
biometric system, from the capturing of the biometric sample to its processing and the
reaching of the final decision [2], [3], [4]. Figure 1 shows such an architecture.

Figure 1: Common Biometric System Architecture

Our research work focuses on advancing the architecture of biometric systems in order to
allow for exploiting the wealth of information accompanying not only the biometric samples
and the related templates, but also the feature extraction and classification algorithms.
More specifically, the key idea behind this architecture lies in the fact that for each biometric
modality (for example, face, palm, iris, etc), a wide set of feature extraction and processing
algorithms has been developed, each of which performs better under specific conditions. For
example, in face recognition systems, there are algorithms which perform better under
intense illumination, other ones which are more effective for the recognition of persons of a
specific race and other ones for partial occlusion.

Hence, the goal of the proposed architecture is to enable the dynamic, on-the-fly selection of
biometric feature extraction and processing algorithms based on the specific conditions
under which the biometric data were captured and the individual algorithm’s metadata. This
metadata describes the class it belongs to (based on extracted features, modality it is to be
applied at), the conditions under which this algorithm performs best, its average
performance metrics (FAR, FRR, EER) and its ranking among the rest of the algorithms in its
class. Figure 2 presents the proposed architecture:

Figure 2 : Proposed Architecture

The proposed architecture introduces a series of new elements which serve its purposes.
These elements include:
(i) a meta-descriptors extraction and
(ii) a processing management component, which are both included in the signal
processing subsystem;
(iii) an algorithm metadescriptors database and
(iv) enrichment of the reference data database with biometric data metadescriptors,
which are part of the Data Storage subsystem;
(v) an algorithm evaluation component in the Comparison subsystem
Each of these new or enriched components will be thoroughly presented in terms of internal
architecture and interactions in the full paper.

Evaluation of Proposed Architecture

Evaluating a system’s architecture is a procedure that is centered on integration and

operational/system behavioral problems and checking the consistency of the system’s
quality attributes, especially in a System of Systems context. In this paper, the purpose of
 the presented architecture is centered around the collective effectiveness of the system’s
algorithmic pool on biometrics problems and thus its evaluation is driven from the multitude
of standardized measures used to reflect the effectiveness of a biometric system, including
False Acceptance Rate (FAR), False Rejection Rate (FFR), Failure to Enroll Rate (FER), False
Identification Rate (FIR) etc. The main idea behind the proposed architecture is to be able to
use every algorithm at its best performance area, thus minimizing all error rates. Usually,
before deploying a biometrics system, there is the need for investigating the factors which
affect its effectiveness (in terms of accuracy) so that any relevant adjustments can be made.
With the proposed architecture, there is no need for that, since we don’t follow the path of
“shoehorning” the problem to fit our solution, but instead we dynamically adapt our system
to best match our problem. The proposed architecture encompasses a wide range of
biometric recognition algorithms and tries to exploit each one’s strength, while at the same
time avoiding specific weaknesses. So it would be reasonably assumed that we need a
different approach to evaluate its performance too. The authors propose the solution of a
modified all-inclusive evaluation scheme [5]. An all-inclusive evaluation in our case will take
into account the algorithmic suitability, affecting factors and performance criteria. In this
approach, the algorithmic suitability criterion implies that since we have an algorithmic pool
from which we choose each time the best-suiting algorithm(s), a central performance metric
would be that of ascertaining if indeed for a specific problem, the architecture proposed the
best-performance algorithm or not.

Conclusions and Future Work

This paper presented a novel biometric system architecture which aims at supporting the
dynamic, on-the-fly selection of feature extraction and processing algorithms based on their
individual innate characteristics and potential as well as a set of metadata of the biometric
sample to be processed. Its main innovation lies in the fact that it allows for the selection of
algorithms to be wrapped up on the biometric sample’ s characteristics in terms of content
and conditions under which it was taken. This matching of algorithms to be applied and
sample metadata extracted is accuracy and performance-oriented.

References
[1] Nick Bartlow, Don Waymire and Gregory Zektser, “Holistic Evaluation of Multi-Biometric
Systems” International Biometric Performance Conference, 2010
[2] M. Gamassi, V. Piuri, D. Sana, and F. Scotti, "A high-level optimum design methodology
for multimodal biometric systems", in Computational Intelligence for Homeland Security and
Personal Safety, 2004. CIHSPS 2004. Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE International Conference
on, pp. 117-124, July, 2004.
[3] Nat Hall, Mike Luckey and Jeremy Worley “Biometrics Enterprise Architecture - Final
Project Report (BMEA Final Report)”, 2009, available at:
http://seor.gmu.edu/projects/SEOR-Fall09/BEA/BMEA_Final_Report.pdf
[4] Common Criteria Biometric Evaluation Methodology Working Group, “Common Criteria -
Common Methodology for Information Technology Security Evaluation - Biometric
Evaluation Methodology Supplement [BEM]”, Version 1.0, August 2002.
[5] Dmitry O. Gorodnichy, “Evolution and evaluation of biometric systems”, Proceedings of
IEEE Symposium on Computation Intelligence for Security and Defence Applications,
CISDA’09, 2009.

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