Finite Field Elliptic Curve for Key Generation and Biometric Template Protection

The need to protect biometric data has been well advised according to various regulations and standards. The most popular Bloom Filter-based template protection schemes for iris recognition directly depend on the keys to avoid linkability challenges. This work presents a new approach for generating the keys directly from the iris biometric data using chaotic maps and elliptic curves over finite fields. Further, we present a new template protection scheme that can directly exploit the generated keys to provide better security using a Quarter-Rounded template encoding which employs the inter-relation of bits in the neighborhood of the iriscode. The proposed approach is validated on the publicly available IITD Iris database and the comparison to the state-of-art Bloom Filter template protection. The proposed approach achieves a comparable performance with the Bloom Filter template protection while eliminating key generation overhead. The proposed template creation approach achieves Genuine Match Rate (GMR) = 99.15% at FMR = 0.01% and EER = 0.77% on the IITD Iris database, with an unlinkability score of 0 and superior revocability.