Alignment-free fingerprint template protection technique based on minutiae neighbourhood information

With the emergence and extensive deployment of biometric-based user authentication system, ensuring the security of biometric template is becoming a growing concern in the research community. One approach to securing template is to transform the original biometric features into a non-invertible form and to use it for a person’s authentication. Registration-based template protection schemes require an accurate alignment of the enrolled and the query images, which is very difficult to achieve. To overcome the alignment issue, registration-free template protection approaches have been proposed that rely on local features such as minutiae details in a fingerprint image. In this paper, we develop an alignment-free fingerprint template protection technique which extracts the rotation and translation invariant features from the neighbouring region of each minutia and then exploits the neighbourhood information to achieve the non-invertible property. Evaluation of the proposed scheme on FVC2002 DB1-B shows that the new method exhibits satisfactory performance in terms of recognition accuracy, computational complexity, and security.