String-based cancelable fingerprint templates

Cancelable (revocable) fingerprint templates have been proposed to protect fingerprint data. However, many of them have incurred significant authentication performance degradation. In this paper, we propose a cancelable fingerprint template design mechanism to protect fingerprint data while maintaining a satisfactory authentication performance. The proposed scheme transforms fingerprint minutiae points into a vector string which serves as the cancelable fingerprint template. The results of the experiment carried out using a public database FVC2002DB2 show that it meets the requirements of revocability, diversity and security for cancelable fingerprint templates, in addition to the low error level.