Fingerprint Template Protection Using Irreversible Minutiae Tetrahedrons

Abstract The use of fingerprint continues to increase constantly with the propagation of biometric authentication technologies. Fingerprint is today the most widely used biometric modality for human verification and identification, due to its practical use and its discriminative structure that allows to different identities to be easily distinguished. Unfortunately, this emergence has been accompanied by a number of problems and challenges related to identity theft and to security issues in general. To address these concerns, many approaches have been proposed in which only few of them were able to reach an acceptable level of both security and performance. In this paper, we propose a new fingerprint template protection scheme that enhances the security of protected system while preserving performance. The proposed approach is a minutiae-based technique that performs fingerprint matching in a transformed space using irreversible minutiae tetrahedrons. Using the original Fingerprint Verification Competition (FVC) protocol, the provided experimental results on FVC2002 DB1, DB2 and DB3 fingerprint databases have shown satisfactory recognition rates. Our results are compared to some existing techniques that use the same protocol of test. We have proved as well that the proposed scheme meets the requirements of revocability, unlinkability and irreversibility.