Biometric authentication verifies the identity of individuals based on what they are. However, biometric authentication systems are error prone and can reject genuine individuals or accept impostors. Researchers on biometric authentication quantify the quality of their algorithm by benchmarking it several databases. However, although the standard evaluation metrics state the performance of a system, they are not able to explain the reasons of these errors.
After presenting the existing evaluation procedures of biometric authentication systems as well as visualisation properties, this talk presents a novel visual evaluation of the results of a biometric authentication system which helps to find which individuals or samples are sources of errors and could help to fix the algorithms. Two variants are proposed: one where the individuals of the database are modelled as a firected graph and another one where the biometric database of scores is modelled as a partitioned power-graph where nodes represent biometric samples and power-nodes represent individuals. A novel recursive edge bundling method is also applied to reduce clutter. This proposal has been successfully applied on several biometric databases and proved its interest.
