Design of alignment-free cancelable fingerprint templates via curtailed circular convolution

Fraudulent use of stolen fingerprint data and privacy invasion by tracking individuals unlawfully with shared or stolen fingerprint data justify the significance of fingerprint template protection. With no a priori fingerprint image registration, alignment-free cancelable fingerprint templates do not suffer from inaccurate singular point detection. In this paper, we propose an effective alignment-free method for constructing cancelable fingerprint templates via curtailed circular convolution. The proposed method features an efficient one-way transform, which protects the input binary string such that it cannot be retrieved from the length-reduced, convolved output vector. The transformed template fulfills the requirements of non-invertibility, revocability and diversity for cancelable fingerprint templates. Evaluation of the proposed scheme over FVC2002 DB1, DB2 and DB3 shows that the new method demonstrates satisfactory performance compared to the existing alignment-free cancelable template schemes. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.