A novel technique for fingerprint template security in biometric authentication systems

The deployment of biometrics spans over almost every application that incorporates user authentication. Fingerprint biometrics in particular is by far the most popular choice in biometric authentication systems. However, vulnerabilities such as database compromise, fingerprint reconstruction, and identity fraud have made it crucial to develop highly robust and privacy-preserving authentication systems. Although there have been considerable efforts in the area, security gaps such as dependency on singular point, scale variability and low user recognition performance limit the real-time application of these techniques. In this paper, we address these performance issues and put forth a novel technique for fingerprint template security. The secure templates generated by the proposed technique are computed using many-to-one mapped fully quantized features. A set of rotation and translation independent features are derived using minutiae triplets which makes the proposed secure fingerprint template an alignment-free user template. Each feature type is rotation and translation invariant making the templates free for scale anomalies. The technique essentially hides the true feature information of a fingerprint with the help of a non-invertible transformation function. This enables user identity verification in the transformed domain itself. An extensive result analysis using five fingerprint databases obtained from FVC2002 and FVC2004 has been carried out. The proposed technique delivers a superior performance compared to other noteworthy contributions and therefore proves to be fit for use in various applications involving fingerprint-based identity verification mechanisms.