Validating a Biometric Authentication System: Sample Size Requirements

Authentication systems based on biometric features (e.g., fingerprint impressions, iris scans, human face images, etc.) are increasingly gaining widespread use and popularity. Often, vendors and owners of these commercial biometric systems claim impressive performance that is estimated based on some proprietary data. In such situations, there is a need to independently validate the claimed performance levels. System performance is typically evaluated by collecting biometric templates from n different subjects, and for convenience, acquiring multiple instances of the biometric for each of the n subjects. Very little work has been done in 1) constructing confidence regions based on the ROC curve for validating the claimed performance levels and 2) determining the required number of biometric samples needed to establish confidence regions of prespecified width for the ROC curve. To simplify the analysis that address these two problems, several previous studies have assumed that multiple a...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: PAMI
• Authors: Sarat C. Dass, Yongfang Zhu, Anil K. Jain
• Keywords: Biometric, Claimed Performance Levels, PAMI 2006, ROC Curve