Anonymous and revocable fingerprint recognition

Abstract

Biometric identification has numerous advantages over conventional ID and password systems; however, the lack of anonymity and revocability of biometric templates is of concern. Several methods have been proposed to address these problems. Many of the approaches require a precise registration before matching in the anonymous domain. We introduce binary string representations of fingerprints that obviates the need for registration and can be directly matched. We describe several techniques for creating anonymous and revocable representations using these binary string representations. The match performance of these representations is evaluated using a large database of fingerprint images. We prove that given an anonymous representation, it is computationally infeasible to invert it to the original fingerprint, thereby preserving privacy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first linear, anonymous and revocable fingerprint representation that is implicitly registered. © 2007 IEEE.