Customer Reviews

Biometric Authentication: A Machine Learning Approach

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Any time you can pick up a used copy of a recently published technical book on an interesting topic at one-fourth of the retail price, you know there must be a problem. You would be right. This book tries to do three things at the same time and fails with at least two of its goals. It tries to talk about the business issues of biometrics, technical issues of specific biometric technologies (face recognition, speech recogniton, etc.), and finally machine learning techniques used to accomplish the biometric measurements. Only at this last goal do I think the book comes close to success, and even then only on a sketchy high level. The first seven chapters do an OK job of explaining machine learning techniques and give you some very instructive figures that are often lacking in academic textbooks, especially on neural networks. Also, these chapters do a pretty good job of explaining the equations involved. What's lacking, though, even in these early chapters, are some simple numerical examples or algorithmic steps that would give you some guidance on how to approach a task. When the book tries to make the leap to connecting the machine learning techniques to biometric authentication in a meaningful way such that a computer scientist could code up an algorithm, the book really falls on its face. There are some nice block diagrams of biometric systems, but no real details on algorithmic steps that would allow you to realize any of those blocks. Instead, there is quite a bit of verbage on the competition involved on building particular kinds of systems, and some rhetoric on possible pitfalls in specific biometric designs. However, with you standing there not knowing where to start with your design, this advice is really not very helpful.

I would say pass on this book and if you need to learn machine learning techniques, start with the older book by Mitchell entitled "Machine Learning". It talks about all of the machine learning techniques mentioned in this book, plus there are plenty of examples. Used copies are still relatively inexpensive, and its content is accessible and complete. As for biometric techniques, I've found the best books concentrate on one technique, such as fingerprint verification, and don't stray into other forms of authentication. The following is the table of contents:

Chapter 1. Overview

Chapter 2. Biometric Authentication Systems

Chapter 3. Expectation-Maximization Theory

Chapter 4. Support Vector Machines

Chapter 5. Multi-Layer Neural Networks

Chapter 6. Modular and Hierarchical Networks

Chapter 7. Decision-Based Neural Networks

Chapter 8. Biometric Authentication by Face Recognition

Chapter 9. Biometric Authentication by Voice Recognition

Chapter 10. Multicue Data Fusion

Appendix A: Convergence Properties of EM

Appendix B: Average Det Curves

Appendix C: Matlab Projects