Data hiding in Fingerprint Minutiae Template for Privacy Protection

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new data hiding scheme in fingerprint minutiae templates that balances data capacity, recognition accuracy, and undetectability, enhancing privacy protection in fingerprint systems.

Contribution

It proposes novel data embedding strategies, including optimized bits replacement and order preserving mechanisms, to improve privacy without significantly affecting recognition performance.

Findings

Achieves sufficient data hiding capacity

Maintains acceptable fingerprint recognition accuracy

Reduces detectability of hidden data

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel scheme for data hiding in the fingerprint minutiae template, which is the most popular in fingerprint recognition systems. Various strategies are proposed in data embedding in order to maintain the accuracy of fingerprint recognition as well as the undetectability of data hiding. In bits replacement based data embedding, we replace the last few bits of each element of the original minutiae template with the data to be hidden. This strategy can be further improved using an optimized bits replacement based data embedding, which is able to minimize the impact of data hiding on the performance of fingerprint recognition. The third strategy is an order preserving mechanism which is proposed to reduce the detectability of data hiding. By using such a mechanism, it would be difficult for the attacker to differentiate the minutiae template with hidden data from the original minutiae templates. The experimental results show that the proposed data hiding scheme achieves sufficient capacity for hiding common personal data, where the accuracy of fingerprint recognition is acceptable after the data hiding.