Robust biometric key extraction based on iris cryptosystem

Abstract

Biometric cryptosystem can not only provide an efficient mechanism for template protection, but also facilitate cryptographic key management, thus becomes a promising direction in information security field. In this paper, we propose a robust key extraction approach which consists of concatenated coding scheme and bit masking scheme based on iris database. The concatenated coding scheme that combines Reed-Solomon code and convolutional code is proposed so that much longer keys can be extracted from the iris data, while the bit masking scheme is proposed to minimize and randomize the errors occur in the iris codes, making the error pattern more suitable for the coding scheme. The experiment results show that the system can achieve a FRR of 0.52% with the key length of 938 bits. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.