F-ratio client dependent normalisation for biometric authentication tasks

The paper investigates a new client-dependent normalisation to improve biometric authentication systems. There exist many client-dependent score normalisation techniques, such as Z-Norm, D-Norm and T-Norm, that are applied to speaker authentication. Such normalisation is intended to adjust the variation across different client models. We propose "F-ratio" normalisation, or F-Norm, applied to face and speaker authentication systems. This normalisation requires only that as few as two client-dependent accesses are available (the more the better). Different from previous normalisation techniques, F-Norm considers the client and impostor distributions simultaneously. We show that F-ratio is a natural choice because it is directly associated to equal error rate. It has the effect of centering the client and impostor distributions such that a global threshold can be easily found. Another difference is that F-Norm actually "interpolates" between client-independent and client-dependent information by introducing a mixture parameter. This parameter can be optimised to maximise the class dispersion (the degree of separability between client and impostor distributions) while the aforementioned normalisation techniques cannot. The results of 13 unimodal experiments carried out on the XM2VTS multimodal database show that such normalisation is advantageous over Z-Norm, client-dependent threshold normalisation or no normalisation.