Pair-polar coordinate-based cancelable fingerprint templates

Fingerprint-based authentication has been widely implemented, however, security and privacy of fingerprint templates still remain an issue. Some schemes have been proposed to protect fingerprint templates, such as the design of cancelable fingerprint templates. Yet, most of the existing schemes rely on accurate fingerprint image registration, which is very hard to achieve, especially considering the need to avoid storing any information related to the raw fingerprint features. In this paper, a pair-polar coordinate-based template design method is developed which does not need registration. The proposed scheme explores the relative relationship of minutiae in a rotation- and shift-free pair-polar framework. A many-to-one mapping is applied to ensure the non-invertible recovery of raw templates. A random translation parameter is introduced to further distort the minutia distribution. Under various scenarios, the proposed scheme is evaluated using the public databases, FVC2002DB1, FVC2002DB2 and FVC2002DB3. The experiment results show that the new method satisfies the template protection requirements and the performance degradation caused by the transformation is very low.