A Comprehensive Re-Evaluation of Biometric Modality Properties in the Modern Era
This work addresses the outdated evaluation framework for biometric modalities, providing updated insights for researchers and practitioners in authentication systems.
The study re-evaluated biometric modality properties through an expert survey of 24 specialists, finding substantial shifts such as improved ratings for face recognition and decreased reliability for fingerprints due to emerging vulnerabilities, with strong alignment between expert assessments and dataset-level uncertainty across 55 datasets.
The rapid advancement of authentication systems and their increasing reliance on biometrics for faster and more accurate user verification experience, highlight the critical need for a reliable framework to evaluate the suitability of biometric modalities for specific applications. Currently, the most widely known evaluation framework is a comparative table from 1998, which no longer adequately captures recent technological developments or emerging vulnerabilities in biometric systems. To address these challenges, this work revisits the evaluation of biometric modalities through an expert survey involving 24 biometric specialists. The findings indicate substantial shifts in property ratings across modalities. For example, face recognition, shows improved ratings due to technological progress, while fingerprint, shows decreased reliability because of emerging vulnerabilities and attacks. Further analysis of expert agreement levels across rated properties highlighted the consistency of the provided evaluations and ensured the reliability of the ratings. Finally, expert assessments are compared with dataset-level uncertainty across 55 biometric datasets, revealing strong alignment in most modalities and underscoring the importance of integrating empirical evidence with expert insight. Moreover, the identified expert disagreements reveal key open challenges and help guide future research toward resolving them.