A non-invertible cancellable fingerprint construct based on compact minutiae patterns

Abstract

This paper proposes a new, privacy-preserving fingerprint construct, which consists of a single pattern created from a small subset of minutiae from the corresponding minutiae template. The sparsity of the resulting feature vector ensures that it cannot be used to reconstruct the underlying fingerprint image, while simultaneously allowing for the cancellability of compromised patterns. The proposed construct is, therefore, inherently a non-invertible cancellable fingerprint template protection scheme. Experimental results on the recognition accuracy of patterns consisting of three, four, and five minutiae were very encouraging: an FRR of 0.4% or less was achieved for all three pattern sizes, while the FAR ranged from 2.1% for 5-minutia patterns to 6.5% for 3-minutia patterns. It took about 0.1 seconds to verify a single person, regardless of the pattern size. These results suggest that the proposed fingerprint construct is suitable for deployment in fingerprint-based civilian authentication applications.