A privacy-preserving cancelable iris template generation scheme using decimal encoding and look-up table mapping

Biometric-based recognition systems have overcome passive issues of traditional human authentication systems. However, security theft and privacy invasion are two passive issues that still persist in the effective deployment of biometric-based authentication systems. Compromise of biometric data can potentially lead to serious security violation as the user's biometric trait cannot be changed. In order to prevent the invasion of biometric templates, it is desired to morph the original biometric template through non-invertible or irreversible transformation function. This transformed template is referred to as cancelable template and can be replaced or reissued in case of compromise. In this paper, we propose a novel cancelable iris template generation technique based on randomized look-up table mapping. The technique utilizes a decimal vector generated from a rotation-invariant feature vector. The feature vector is generated using 1-D Log Gabor filter applied to the iris image. Experiments carried out on various iris databases confirm the efficacy of the proposed approach. After applying the template protection mechanism, we have achieved Equal Error Rate (EER) of 0.37%, 0.43% and 0.79% for CASIA-V 1.0, CASIA-V3-Interval and ICE 2005 iris databases, respectively. Moreover, the transformation preserves the irreversibility, revocability and diversity properties of the concealable iris templates.