A robust and singular point independent fingerprint shell

Abstract

Authentication systems have evolved immensely ever since the use of biometrics in the field of security has started. Nonetheless, extensive usage of biometric systems has also resulted in growing fear of identity theft as storing biometric user templates in databases opens up severe security concerns. Consequently, the scope of biometrics invariably depends on the ability of the system to manifest security and robustness against biometric identity theft along with achieving acceptable recognition performance. This paper proposes a user template protection technique to secure a fingerprint based user template used in a biometric authentication system. It is based on the fingerprint shell, which computes alignment-free, singular point independent, and non-invertible user templates. The secure user template generated by the proposed technique comprises fingerprint shell curves computed using the transformed pair-polar structure of the minutia points. The proposed technique has been evaluated on five fingerprint databases of Fingerprint Verification Competitions, namely, FVC2002, FVC2004, and FVC2006. The effectiveness of the technique is analyzed in terms of revocability, diversity, security, and recognition performance. The comparison of results with that of the existing techniques demonstrates the robustness and efficacy of the proposed technique. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.