Ranking Based Locality Sensitive Hashing Enabled Cancelable Biometrics: Index-of-Max Hashing

TL;DR

This paper introduces Index-of-Max (IoM) hashing, a novel ranking-based locality sensitive hashing method for cancelable biometric templates, enhancing security, robustness, and privacy in fingerprint recognition systems.

Contribution

It proposes a new IoM hashing scheme with two realizations, improving biometric template protection through non-invertibility, robustness, and scale-invariance.

Findings

Achieves high accuracy on FVC2002 and FVC2004 fingerprint datasets.

Demonstrates resilience against security and privacy attacks.

Satisfies revocability and unlinkability criteria for cancelable biometrics.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a ranking based locality sensitive hashing inspired two-factor cancelable biometrics, dubbed "Index-of-Max" (IoM) hashing for biometric template protection. With externally generated random parameters, IoM hashing transforms a real-valued biometric feature vector into discrete index (max ranked) hashed code. We demonstrate two realizations from IoM hashing notion, namely Gaussian Random Projection based and Uniformly Random Permutation based hashing schemes. The discrete indices representation nature of IoM hashed codes enjoy serveral merits. Firstly, IoM hashing empowers strong concealment to the biometric information. This contributes to the solid ground of non-invertibility guarantee. Secondly, IoM hashing is insensitive to the features magnitude, hence is more robust against biometric features variation. Thirdly, the magnitude-independence trait of IoM hashing makes the hash codes being scale-invariant, which is critical for matching and feature alignment. The experimental results demonstrate favorable accuracy performance on benchmark FVC2002 and FVC2004 fingerprint databases. The analyses justify its resilience to the existing and newly introduced security and privacy attacks as well as satisfy the revocability and unlinkability criteria of cancelable biometrics.