An ear template protection method

Biometric template encryption is a relatively new research interest in the field of biometric recognition. This paper proposes an encryption method for ear biometric template based on fuzzy vault and Biohashing. The key of fuzzy vault is then further protected by AES-128 algorithm. The proposed method includes three parts: ear feature vector preprocessing, encoding of ear template, decoding of ear template. The preprocessing step is to extract ear feature template and provide the helper data; The encoding step is to encode the ear template using polynomial and construct the fuzzy vault; The decoding step is to apply ear authentication and reconstruct the polynomial using the matched points, and then restore the key. Experimental results on the USTB ear database show that fuzzy vault can be successfully applied on ear template protection.