Multi-privacy biometric protection scheme using ensemble systems

Abstract

Biometric systems use personal biological or behavioural traits that can uniquely characterise an individual but this uniqueness property also becomes its potential weakness when the template characterising a biometric trait is stolen or compromised. To this end, we consider two strategies to improving biometric template protection and performance, namely, (1) using multiple privacy schemes and (2) using multiple matching algorithms. While multiple privacy schemes can improve the security of a biometric system by protecting its template; using multiple matching algorithms or similarly, multiple biometric traits along with their respective matching algorithms, can improve the system performance due to reduced intra-class variability. The above two strategies lead to a novel, ensemble system that is derived from multiple privacy schemes. Our findings suggest that, under the worst-case scenario evaluation where the key or keys protecting the template are stolen, multi-privacy protection scheme can outperform a single protection scheme as well as the baseline biometric system without template protection.