A geometric transformation to protect minutiae-based fingerprint templates

Abstract

The increasing use of biometrics in different environments presents new challenges. Most importantly, biometric data are irreplaceable. Therefore, storing biometric templates, which is unique to individual user, entails significant security risks. In this paper, we propose a geometric transformation for securing the minutiae based fingerprint templates. The proposed scheme employs a robust one-way transformation that maps geometrical configuration of the minutiae points into a fixed-length code vector. This representation enables efficient alignment and reliable matching. Experiments are conducted by applying the proposed method on a synthetically generated minutiae point sets. Preliminary results show that the proposed scheme provides a simple and effective solution to the template security problem of the minutiae based fingerprint.