Title: Recognition accuracy of the new fingerprint construct based on a compact minutiae pattern

Authors: Vedrana Krivokuća; Waleed Abdulla

Addresses: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Auckland, Auckland 1142, New Zealand ' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Auckland, Auckland 1142, New Zealand

Abstract: Instead of using the entire minutiae template to generate a protected fingerprint template, recently a non-invertible cancellable fingerprint construct based on a 3-5 minutiae pattern was proposed as a safer alternative. This paper investigates the recognition accuracy attainable by this new fingerprint construct. It is found that using five samples of a person's reference fingerprint and allowing for a maximum of three authentication attempts provides a genuine user with the best chance of being successfully authenticated. An evaluation of the FAR and FRR in this scenario demonstrates that the new fingerprint construct can be tuned to suit the performance and security requirements of different applications by adjusting the pattern size and matching thresholds. The fingerprint construct is then modified to improve its ability to discriminate between genuine users and impostors. Compared to other non-invertible fingerprint template protection schemes, the performance of the modified fingerprint construct is found to be favourable.

Keywords: fingerprints; fingerprint template protection; fingerprint construct; minutiae template; compact minutiae pattern; recognition accuracy; cancellable biometrics; non-invertible fingerprint template; non-invertibility; cancellability; diversity; individual authentication; biometrics; security; individual verification.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBM.2015.070929

International Journal of Biometrics, 2015 Vol.7 No.2, pp.170 - 189

Received: 06 Feb 2015
Accepted: 07 May 2015
Published online: 31 Jul 2015 *

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