Innovative Hetero-Associative Memory Encoder (HAMTE) for Palmprint Template Protection

Abstract

Many types of research focus on utilizing Palmprint recognition in user identification and authentication. The Palmprint is one of biometric authentication (something you are) invariable during a person’s life and needs careful protection during enrollment into different biometric authentication systems. Accuracy and irreversibility are critical requirements for securing the Palmprint template during enrollment and verification. This paper proposes an innovative HAMTE neural network model that contains Hetero-Associative Memory for Palmprint template translation and projection using matrix multiplication and dot product multiplication. A HAMTE-Siamese network is constructed, which accepts two Palmprint templates and predicts whether these two templates belong to the same user or different users. The HAMTE is generated for each user during the enrollment phase, which is responsible for generating a secure template for the enrolled user. The proposed network secures the person’s Palmprint template by translating it into an irreversible template (different features space). It can be stored safely in a trusted/untrusted third-party authentication system that protects the original person’s template from being stolen. Experimental results are conducted on the CASIA database, where the proposed network achieved accuracy close to the original accuracy for the unprotected Palmprint templates. The recognition accuracy deviated by around 3%, and the equal error rate (EER) by approximately 0.02 compared to the original data, with appropriate performance (approximately 13 ms) while preserving the irreversibility property of the secure template. Moreover, the brute-force attack has been analyzed under the new Palmprint protection scheme.