Generating protected fingerprint template utilizing coprime mapping transformation

Abstract: The identity of a user is permanently lost if biometric data gets compromised since the biometric information is irreplaceable and irrevocable. To revoke and reissue a new template in place of the compromised biometric template, the idea of cancelable biometrics has been introduced. The concept behind cancelable biometric is to irreversibly transform the original biometric template and perform the comparison in the protected domain. In this paper, a coprime transformation scheme has been proposed to derive a protected fingerprint template. The method divides the fingerprint region into a number of sectors with respect to each minutiae point and identifies the nearest-neighbor minutiae in each sector. Then, ridge features for all neighboring minutiae points are computed and mapped onto co-prime positions of a random matrix to generate the cancelable template. The proposed approach achieves an EER of 1.82, 1.39, 4.02 and 5.77 on DB1, DB2, DB3 and DB4 datasets of the FVC2002 and an EER of 8.70, 7.95, 5.23 and 4.87 on DB1, DB2, DB3 and DB4 datasets of FVC2004 databases, respectively. Experimental evaluations indicate that the method outperforms in comparison to the current state-of-the-art. Moreover, it has been confirmed from the security analysis that the proposed method fulfills the desired characteristics of diversity, revocability, and non-invertibility with a minor performance degradation caused by the transformation.