A secure fingerprint template generation mechanism using visual secret sharing with inverse halftoning

Abstract

Fingerprints are the most popular and widely practiced biometric trait for human recognition and authentication. Due to the wide approval, reliable fingerprint template generation and secure saving of the generated templates are highly vital. Since fingers are permanently connected to the human body, loss of fingerprint data is irreversible. Cancelable fingerprint templates are used to overcome this problem. This paper introduces a novel cancelable fingerprint template generation mechanism using Visual Secret Sharing (VSS), data embedding, inverse halftoning, and super-resolution. During the fingerprint template generation, VSS shares with some hidden information are formulated as the secure cancelable template. Before authentication, the secret fingerprint image is reconstructed back from the VSS shares. The experimental results show that the proposed cancelable templates are simple, secure, and fulfill all the properties of the ideal cancelable templates, such as security, accuracy, non-invertibility, diversity, and revocability. The experimental analysis shows that the reconstructed fingerprint images are similar to the original fingerprints in terms of visual parameters and matching error rates. © 2023 Elsevier Inc.