Alignment-free fuzzy vault scheme for fingerprints

The fuzzy vault scheme aims to secure user´s critical data (secret encryption key) with the fingerprint data in a way that only the legitimate user is able to access the key by providing his fingerprint. The existing fuzzy vaults constructions are mainly based on techniques which require a pre-alignment phase of template biometric sample and the query one. This remains a challenging task and keeps the systems less practical. Also some information leakage may be caused because of some helper data is needed to be stored for alignment purposes. We expose a novel approach for constructing a fuzzy vault scheme for fingerprints fusing the local textures related to selected minutiae points which are invariant to the transformation in fingerprint capturing. The proposed scheme can avoid the problematic alignment procedure and also improve the security of fuzzy vault.