Fuzzy Vault for 3D Face Recognition Systems

Biometric authentication methods are often being considered as a possible complement or even replacement of widely used password or token based authentication mechanisms. However, because of the fact that biometric traits are intrinsically tied to a person, several legitimate questions arise as biometric methods become more and more popular, such as the protection of personal information which is being gathered and stored alongside a biometric reference, the control of a possible connection of various biometric data of one user in different applications and the cancellation of compromised biometric data. Efforts that contain solutions for the problems which arise from these questions are being described as template protection method and are topic of current research. One method relies on protection of biometric data by a cryptographic concept named fuzzy vault. This paper specifically investigates the applicability of the concept to protect data used in three dimensional facial recognition. A prototype of that method has been implemented and checked for its ability to be adapted for use with data from 3D face scans.