In this paper, we investigate a new multimodal
biometric approach for personal recognition, based on two
different biometrics computed from the same hand image:
palmprint and fingerprint surface. The detection of these
modalities is conducted with no constraints imposed on the
subject. In addition, this approach has the particularity of
using a new fusion scheme based on the rank level integration
method to consolidate the results obtained from the different
biometric instances. Rank level fusion is a relatively new fusion
approach. It is not a well-studied research problem, yet it
has a high potential for efficient consolidation of multiple
unimodal biometric outputs matching. To the best of our
knowledge, we present the first application of the rank level
fusion to consolidate the rank information produced by the
five individual fingerprint surface and the palmprint. The
achieved experimental results have shown that the designed
system achieves an excellent recognition rate and provides more
security than unimodal biometric system.