Towards an Optimal Template Reduction for Securing Embedded Fingerprint Devices

Template protection is an important issue in biometrics for security and privacy reasons. One solution for securing fingerprint data is to store it on a Secure Element (a microcircuit chipset such as a smartcard). An embedded On-Card-Comparison (OCC) module permits to compare two biometric templates and generates a similarity score. The biometric template is usually composed of minutiae extracted from the fingerprint image because a Secure element is limited in terms of memory and computation capabilities. For these reasons, a template reduction is necessary to quickly process fingerprint comparison. In this paper, we propose a new fingerprint template reduction scheme by approximating the optimal choice of minutiae with a genetic algorithm. We compared the proposed method with approaches from the literature using a fingerprint dataset and three matching algorithms. The experimental results show the benefit of the proposed method especially in order to estimate the optimal performance when reducing the fingerprint template given a number of minutiae