Biometric Template Protection Using Universal Background Models: An Application to Online Signature

Data security and privacy are crucial issues to be addressed for assuring a successful deployment of biometrics-based recognition systems in real life applications. In this paper, a template protection scheme exploiting the properties of universal background models, eigen-user spaces, and the fuzzy commitment cryptographic protocol is presented. A detailed discussion on the security and information leakage of the proposed template protection system is given. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is investigated with application to online signature recognition. The given experimental results, evaluated on the public MCYT signature database, show that the proposed system can guarantee competitive recognition accuracy while providing protection to the employed biometric data.