A new multimodal biometric database designed and acquired within the framework of the European BioSecure Network of Excellence is presented. It is comprised of more than 600 individuals acquired simultaneously in three scenarios: 1) over the Internet, 2) in an office environment with desktop PC, and 3) in indoor/outdoor environments with mobile portable hardware. The three scenarios include a common part of audio/video data. Also, signature and fingerprint data have been acquired both with desktop PC and mobile portable hardware. Additionally, hand and iris data were acquired in the second scenario using desktop PC. Acquisition has been conducted by 11 European institutions. Additional features of the BioSecure Multimodal Database (BMDB) are: two acquisition sessions, several sensors in certain modalities, balanced gender and age distributions, multimodal realistic scenarios with simple and quick tasks per modality, cross-European diversity, availability of demographic data, and compatibility with other multimodal databases. The novel acquisition conditions of the BMDB allow us to perform new challenging research and evaluation of either monomodal or multimodal biometric systems, as in the recent BioSecure Multimodal Evaluation campaign. A description of this campaign including baseline results of individual modalities from the new database is also given. The database is expected to be available for research purposes through the BioSecure Association during 2008.

A biometric template protection system for dynamic signature verification is presented. The approach uses auxiliary (helper) data that allows the matching with secure templates but do not provide information to a potential attacker. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated using the MCYT signature database comprising 330 users, with 25 genuine signatures and 25 skilled forgeries per user. The results show similar performance compared to the baseline unprotected system. However, the security of the proposed system against attacks to the template database is significantly higher.

In the present contribution, the applicability of off-line handwritten signatures to the fuzzy vault construction is studied. Feature extraction is based on quantized maxima and minima from upper and lower envelopes of the signature. Baseline results are reported for skilled and random forgeries of the MCYT off-line signature database, showing that the proposed scheme is suitable for signers with good separability between genuine signatures and skilled forgeries.

In this work, resampling techniques and interpolation are applied to on-line signatures. Their effect on the performance of an on-line signature system using hidden Markov models is studied. The presented techniques are based on linear interpolation and Catmull-Rom cubic splines. Experimental results are provided on the MCYT database comprising 16,500 signatures from 330 subjects and as many skilled forgeries. Our approach allows to reduce the sampling rate of the on-line signature capture system, leading to the reduction of storage resource requirements and increased simplicity without compromising and even enhancing the system performance. This also leads to the discussion of which is the minimum sampling rate for HMM-based dynamic signature verification.