Cancelable biometrics for fingerprint template protection

Abstract

In today’s technologically driven era, fingerprint biometric systems are widely used systems to provide secure access control and to protect the sensitive data of users. In fingerprint biometric systems, minutiae points are mainly employed to compute the template that will be stored in the database for recognition purposes. However, the stored template is vulnerable to attack and can be used to reconstruct the fingerprint image as discussed in the literature, which eventually causes an individual’s permanent identity loss. Therefore, the fingerprint template should be protected before storing it in the database. To do so, cancelable biometrics-based approaches are one of the prominent approaches presented in the literature. The main principle of cancelable biometrics is to store the transformed secure template in place of the original template, which makes reconstruction of fingerprint images an infeasible task. Considering the importance of cancelable biometrics, this chapter presents a detailed discussion of the concept of cancelable biometrics and a brief discussion of various recent existing techniques. Furthermore, a detailed discussion of a few of the recent cancelable fingerprint template generation approaches is also presented in this chapter, which provides a comprehensive understanding of these approaches, along with a discussion on their experimental results. © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Amit Kumar Singh, Stefano Berretti, Ashima Anand, and Amrit Kumar Agrawal

individual chapters, the contributors.