A Scheme for Template Security at Feature Fusion Level in Multimodal Biometric System

Biometrics is the science of human recognition by means of their biological, chemical or behavioural traits. These systems are used in many real life applications simply from biometric based attendance system to providing security at a very sophisticated level. A biometric system deals with raw data captured using a sensor and feature template extracted from raw image. One of the challenges being faced by designers of these systems is to secure template data extracted from the biometric modalities of the user and protect the raw images. In order to minimize spoof attacks on biometric systems by unauthorised users one of the solutions is to use multi-biometric systems. Multi-modal biometric system works by using fusion technique to merge feature templates generated from different modalities of the human. In this work, a novel scheme is proposed to secure template during feature fusion level. The scheme is based on union operation of fuzzy relations of templates of modalities during fusion process of multimodal biometric systems. This approach serves dual purpose of feature fusion as well as transformation of templates into a single secured non invertible template. The proposed technique is irreversible, diverse and experimentally tested on a bimodal biometric system comprising of fingerprint and hand geometry. The given scheme results into significant improvement in the performance of the system with lower equal error rate and improvement in genuine acceptance rate.