A non-invertible cancelable fingerprint template generation based on ridge feature transformation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel non-invertible ridge feature transformation for cancelable fingerprint templates, enhancing security and privacy by preventing original data leakage while maintaining verification performance.

Contribution

The paper proposes a new ridge feature transformation method using sector partitioning, Cantor pairing, and random projection for secure cancelable fingerprint templates.

Findings

Outperforms existing fingerprint cancelable template methods.

Fulfills non-invertibility, revocability, and diversity requirements.

Maintains high verification accuracy with minor performance loss.

Abstract

In a biometric verification system, leakage of biometric data leads to permanent identity loss since original biometric data is inherently linked to a user. Further, various types of attacks on a biometric system may reveal the original template and utility in other applications. To address these security and privacy concerns cancelable biometric has been introduced. Cancelable biometric constructs a protected template from the original biometric template using transformation functions and performs the comparison between templates in the transformed domain. Recent approaches towards cancelable fingerprint generation either rely on aligning minutiae points with respect to singular points (core/delta) or utilize the absolute coordinate positions of minutiae points. In this paper, we propose a novel non-invertible ridge feature transformation method to protect the original fingerprint template information. The proposed method partitions the fingerprint region into a number of sectors with reference to each minutia point employing a ridge-based co-ordinate system. The nearest neighbor minutiae in each sector are identified, and ridge-based features are computed. Further, a cancelable template is generated by applying the Cantor pairing function followed by random projection. We have evaluated our method with FVC2002, FVC2004 and FVC2006 databases. It is evident from the experimental results that the proposed method outperforms existing methods in the literature. Moreover, the security analysis demonstrates that the proposed method fulfills the necessary requirements of non-invertibility, revocability, and diversity with a minor performance degradation caused due to cancelable transformation.