Fingerprint template protection using minutia-pair spectral representations
This work addresses privacy preservation for people enrolled in biometric databases, but it is incremental as it builds upon existing spectral function methods.
The paper tackles the problem of protecting fingerprint biometric templates by extending a spectral function approach to create a fixed-length representation and constructing a helper data system with zero-leakage quantization and the Code Offset Method. The result shows that this system causes only a small performance penalty compared to unprotected authentication, as demonstrated by empirical data.
Storage of biometric data requires some form of template protection in order to preserve the privacy of people enrolled in a biometric database. One approach is to use a Helper Data System. Here it is necessary to transform the raw biometric measurement into a fixed-length representation. In this paper we extend the spectral function approach of Stanko and Skoric [WIFS2017], which provides such a fixed-length representation for fingerprints. First, we introduce a new spectral function that captures different information from the minutia orientations. It is complementary to the original spectral function, and we use both of them to extract information from a fingerprint image. Second, we construct a helper data system consisting of zero-leakage quantisation followed by the Code Offset Method. We show empirical data which demonstrates that applying our helper data system causes only a small performance penalty compared to fingerprint authentication based on the unprotected spectral functions.