An Alignment-Free Fingerprint Template Protection Technique Based on Minutiae Triplets

Abstract

Biometric template protection has been a topic of interest ever since biometrics took over authentication and verification systems. High sensitivity of biometric information of an individual makes it paramount to transform the raw biometric data into an irreversible form that can be enrolled into the database. Fingerprint-based biometric systems make use of minutiae points information. However, it has been shown that the original fingerprint information can be retraced using the measurements of its minutiae points. Consequently, it is essential to ensure that the fingerprint templates in fingerprint-based biometric systems are secure. Fingerprint authentication systems often encounter the problem of variation among fingerprint impressions of the same subject. This arises due to the effect of rotation and translation at the sensor end while capturing the fingerprint data. To eliminate these issues, an alignment-free template protection technique has been proposed in this work, which not only solves the problem of revocability but also provides a secure irreversible transformation without having to compromise the performance of the authentication system. Experimental analysis has been conducted on FVC2002 DB1 and FVC2002 DB2 databases and it depicts highly encouraging performance. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.