Tsai-Yang Jea

Anonymous and Revocable Fingerprint Recognition

Biometric identification has numerous advantages over conventional ID and password systems; however, the lack of anonymity and revocability of biometric templates is of concern. Several methods have been proposed to address these problems. Many of the approaches require a precise registration before matching in the anonymous domain. We introduce binary string representations of fingerprints that obviates the need for registration and can be directly matched. We describe several techniques for creating anonymous and revocable representations using these binary string representations. The match performance of these representations is evaluated using a large database of fingerprint images. We prove that given an anonymous representation, it is computationally infeasible to invert it to the original fingerprint, thereby preserving privacy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first linear, anonymous and revocable fingerprint representation that is implicitly registered.

Gradient based Textural Characterization of Fingerprints

Though a lot of research has been done to match fingerprints, most existing approaches rely on locations of minutiae features for matching tasks. Relatively, little effort has gone into utilizing textural information present in fingerprints as distinguishing characteristic. In this paper, we propose a novel gradient-based approach to characterize textural information in fingerprints for the task of biometric matching. In particular, the proposed approach uses histograms of oriented gradients (HOGs) to represent minutiae neighborhoods. The minutiae neighborhoods are divided into several regions to make the computed histograms distinguishing and robust at the same time. Experimental results are provided to show the efficacy of the proposed characterization.

Security and Accuracy Trade-off in Anonymous Fingerprint Recognition

The security, lack of anonymity and revocability of the biometric template are critical issues that need to be addressed in order to vindicate the viability of biometric based authentication systems. Several methods have been proposed to address these problems. However, most of these methods offer lower accuracies than the base system where the template is insecure. This is because in most systems the gain in the security is achieved as a result of loss in non-redundant information. In this paper, we describe tradeoff between accuracy of an anonymous system and the security of the biometrics system. As a case study we start with a highly secure representation of a fingerprint. Then we describe several methods and show experimental results proving that every time we add more information to the secure representation, the accuracy increases, however valuable information is revealed to an adversary. We propose, via a k-trial attack model, how the trade-off can be complemented by another security policy such as an account lockout after a given number of attempts.