A novel key generation cryptosystem based on face features

With the development of Internet, Information security is becoming more and more important. Traditional cryptographic methods require the user to remember keys, it is not convenient. Biometrics based cryptographic key generation techniques generate cryptographic keys from biometrics directly. In this paper, we propose a biometric cryptosystem based on face biometrics. At encryption stage, a 128-dimensional principal component analysis (PCA) feature vector is firstly extracted from the face image. And a 128 bit binary vector is obtained by thresholding. Then we select the distinguishable bits to form bio-key and the optimal bit order number is saved in a look-up table. Furthermore, an error-correct-code (ECC) is generated using Reed-Solomon algorithm. The message is encrypted using symmetric DES with bio-key. In decryption phase, a 128-dimensional PCA features vector extracted from the query face image. Then a bio-key is generated using the look-up table generated at encryption stage. The final key is obtained using both bio-key and Error correct code (ECC). Finally, the symmetric DES decryption algorithm implemented to obtain message using final key. The proposed scheme is tested using ORL face database, the experimental results shows that our algorithm is effective.