A non-invertible transformation based technique to protect a fingerprint template

Abstract

A fingerprint-based authentication system provides security to the applications of numerous fields and usually stores minutiae information in the database as a template. It has been observed from the literature that the reconstruction of an original fingerprint is possible from minutiae points information; hence the security of the stored template becomes extremely crucial. Cancellable biometric techniques based on non-invertible transformation protect the stored template. These techniques prevent the reconstruction of original fingerprint data from the compromised template and avoid unauthorized access to the system. In this paper, a technique based on the non-invertible transformation to protect a fingerprint template is proposed. In the technique, minutiae locations in a fingerprint are transformed by using the minutiae's original locations and orientation information, and a user keyset. A principal component analysis based approach to align the probe and gallery templates of fingerprint images while matching is also proposed. The evaluation of the proposed technique is carried out on seven different fingerprint databases taken from FVC2000, FVC2002, and FVC2004 databases, and its performance is compared with other existing state-of-the-art techniques in the literature. The comparative performance shows that the proposed technique is highly robust and performs exceptionally well compared to other existing techniques. © 2021 The Authors. IET Image Processing published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of The Institution of Engineering and Technology