This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Pattern Recognition. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Pattern Recognition, 38, 5, (2005) DOI: 10.1016/j.patcog.2004.11.012 ; A novel score-level fusion strategy based on quality measures for multimodal biometric authentication is presented. In the proposed method, the fusion function is adapted every time an authentication claim is performed based on the estimated quality of the sensed biometric signals at this time. Experimental results combining written signatures and quality-labelled fingerprints are reported. The proposed scheme is shown to outperform significantly the fusion approach without considering quality signals. In particular, a relative improvement of approximately 20% is obtained on the publicly available MCYT bimodal database.