IRIS template protection using a digital modulation paradigm

Template protection is an issue of paramount importance in the design of biometric recognition systems. In this paper we present a biometric cryptosystem applied to iris biometrics, where template security is guaranteed by means of a framework inspired by the digital modulation paradigm. Specifically, the properties of modulation constellations and turbo codes with soft-decoding are exploited to design a system with high performance in terms of both verification rates and security, even while dealing with a biometrics characterized by a high intra-class variability such as the iris. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is evaluated by performing tests on the Interval subset of the CASIA-IrisV4 database.