Automatic alignment of fingerprint features for fuzzy fingerprint vault

Abstract

Biometrics-based user authentication has several advantages over traditional password-based systems for standalone authentication applications. This is also true for new authentication architectures known as crypto-biometric systems, where cryptography and biometrics are merged to achieve high security and user convenience at the same time. Recently, a cryptographic construct, called fuzzy vault, has been proposed for crypto-biometric systems. This construct aims to secure critical data(e.g., secret encryption key) with the fingerprint data in a way that only the authorized user can access the secret by providing the valid fingerprint, and some implementations results for fingerprint have been reported. However, all the previous results assumed that fingerprint features were pre-aligned, and automatic alignment in the fuzzy vault domain is a challenging issue. In this paper, we perform the automatic alignment of fingerprint features by using the geometric hashing technique which has been used for model-based object recognition applications. Based on the preliminary experimental results, we confirm that the proposed approach can align fingerprint features automatically in the domain of the fuzzy vault and can be integrated with any fuzzy fingerprint vault systems. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.