A standoff multimodal biometric system

Biometric authentication modalities such as face and iris recognition provide a minimally invasive means to uniquely identify individuals and verify identity. Most commercially available biometric systems perform authentication based on a single modality and/or only capture features from a short distance. Most existing standoff iris sensors capture at a lower frame rate, lower resolution, and wider field of view than our system. This work describes the design of a prototype standoff biometric sensor. The complete system is comprised of three sensors, their respective software control modules, and a command and control graphical user interface. Sensor 1 is a high resolution monochrome camera with telephoto zoom and video rate image acquisition. Co-aligned, collimated near infrared (NIR) light emitting diodes (LEDs) provide controlled illumination to facilitate the capture of face and iris images. Sensor 2 is a monochrome stereo camera that acquires low resolution frontal face images and scene depth information. Sensor 3 is dual spectrum camera that acquires pixel registered visible and NIR images at video rate. Ambient room light and NIR flood LEDs provide illumination for capturing profile face and gait images. Real-time analysis of the stereo camera output provides feedback for pan, tilt, zoom, and focus of the sensor platform. A Modularized software control system provides scalability and flexible management. Commodity hardware can be used to control all system components with the exception of sensor 1.