Information Fusion

Information fusion is the merging of disparate information, usually from different sources, which is combined in order to achieve a wider perspective on a problem than is possible if only one type of information were considered. In the context of multimodal biometric authentication, the term is used to describe how information from different biometric modalities, for example a facial image and a voice sample, can be combined to make a better decision on whether the person seeking to be authenticated is who he or she claims to be. Depending on where in the system the information from the two modalities is combined, one can distinguish between feature fusion, score fusion, and decision fusion. Feature fusion is also known as early fusion, while the latter two fusion types are known collectively as late fusion. Feature fusion is a method, by which the features from the different modalities are fused into combined feature vectors after the feature extraction stage, but before the pattern...