A cancelable biometric authentication system based on feature-adaptive random projection

Abstract Biometric template data protection is critical in preventing user privacy and identity from leakage. Random projection based cancelable biometrics is an efficient and effective technique to achieve biometric template protection. However, traditional random projection based cancelable template design suffers from the attack via record multiplicity (ARM), where an adversary obtains multiple transformed templates from different applications and the associated parameter keys so as to assemble them into a full-rank linear equation system, thereby retrieving the original feature vector. To address this issue, in this paper we propose a feature-adaptive random projection based method, in which the projection matrixes, the key to the ARM, are generated from one basic matrix in conjunction with local feature slots. The generated projection matrixes are discarded after use, thus making it difficult for the adversary to launch the ARM. Moreover, the random projection in the proposed method is performed on a local-feature basis. This feature-adaptive random projection can mitigate the negative impact of biometric uncertainty on recognition accuracy, as it limits the error to part of the transformed feature vector rather than the entire vector. The proposed method is evaluated on four public available databases FVC2002 DB1-DB3 and FVC2004 DB2. The experimental results and security analysis show the validity of the proposed method.