Enhancing Biometric Security Using Artificial Neural Network-Based Multimodal Fusion of Facial Recognition and Fingerprint Identification

International audience Biometric authentication systems based on a single modality remain vulnerable to spoofing, acquisition noise, and intra-class variation, limiting their reliability in high-security access-control applications. This study presents an artificial neural network-based multimodal framework that combines facial recognition and fingerprint identification to improve authentication accuracy, robustness, and presentation-attack resistance. Facial features are extracted using a convolutional neural network, while fingerprint texture and minutiae representations are obtained using Gabor filters and a denoising autoencoder. Feature-level and score-level information is integrated through a multilayer-perceptron meta-learner, followed by an adaptive decision module incorporating modality-specific liveness assessment. The framework was evaluated using the Labeled Faces in the Wild dataset, FVC2006, and the custom Bayelsa Multimodal Biometric Dataset comprising 320 subjects. On the reported BMBD test split, the system achieved 99.14% verification accuracy, a false acceptance rate of 0.12%, a false rejection rate of 0.34%, and an equal error rate of 0.19%. The reported performance exceeded the best unimodal baseline by 6.8 percentage points and the strongest compared multimodal method by 1.93 percentage points. End-to-end inference required 143 ms on the stated embedded platform. The ablation results indicated that learned fusion, metric-learning losses, and liveness detection each contributed to performance. These findings support the feasibility of the proposed framework under the reported experimental conditions, while broader independent evaluation remains necessary.