Biometric authentication systems: Trends, challenges, and future prospects – A comprehensive review

With cyber security concerns high on the list of issues, it is no surprise that demand for secure confidentiality for all users and objects is at an all-time high; at the same time, the development of robust reliable systems for providing confidentiality is also at an all-time high due to the increasing degree of use of the internet. Systems will utilize the authenticated user identifying that combines both provided user identifying information with data stored in a secure database. Traditional authentication methods (passwords and pin numbers) have been proven inadequate to provide robust security and improve user experience with the rise of cyber security threats. Individual unimodal biometric systems face multiple challenges. For this reason, a multi biometric authenticating system (using more than one biometric characteristic) would be a viable solution to the limitations of unimodal biometric authentication systems by providing greater robustness and reliability to the authentication process. Multimodal biometric authentication systems leverage several biometric traits, to boost the security and accuracy of identity verification. The proposed system has four major components such as preprocessing, feature extraction, feature fusion, and authentication. By merging data from multiple modalities, these systems get around the limitations of unimodal biometric systems.