Extracting binary strings from real-valued biometric templates is a fundamental step in template compression and protection systems, such as fuzzy commitment, fuzzy extractor, secure sketch, and helper data systems. Quantization and coding is the straightforward way to extract binary representations from arbitrary real-valued biometric modalities. In this paper, we propose a pairwise adaptive phase quantization (APQ) method, together with a long-short (LS) pairing strategy, which aims to maximize the overall detection rate. Experimental results on the FVC2000 fingerprint and the FRGC face database show reasonably good verification performances.
1. Introduction
Extracting binary biometric strings is a fundamental step in template compression and protection [1]. It is well known that biometric information is unique, yet inevitably noisy, leading to intraclass variations. Therefore, the binary strings are desired not only to be discriminative, but also have to low intraclass variations. Such requirements translate to both low false acceptance rate (FAR) and low false rejection rate (FRR). Additionally, from the template protection perspective, we know that general biometric information is always public, thus any person has some knowledge of the distribution of biometric features. Furthermore, the biometric bits in the binary string should be independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.), in order to maximize the attacker's efforts in guessing the target template.
Several biometric template protection concepts have been published. Cancelable biometrics [2, 3] distort the image of a face or a fingerprint by using a one-way geometric distortion function. The fuzzy vault method [4, 5] is a cryptographic construction allowing to store a secret in a vault that can be locked using a possibly unordered set of features, for example, fingerprint minutiae. A third group of techniques, containing fuzzy commitment [6], fuzzy extractor [7], secure sketch [8], and helper data system [9–13], derive a binary string from a biometric measurement and store an irreversibly hashed version of the string with or without binding a crypto key. In this paper, we adopt the third group of techniques.
The straightforward way to extract binary strings is quantization and coding of the real-valued features. So far, many works [9–11, 14–20] have adopted the bit extraction framework shown in Figure 1, involving two tasks: (1) designing a one-dimensional quantizer and (2) determining the number of quantization bits for every feature. The final binary string is then the concatenation of the output bits from all the individual features.
Figure 1. The bit extraction framework based on the one-dimensional quantization and coding,
where
denotes the number of features;
denotes the number of quantization bits for the
th feature (
), and
denotes the output bits. The final binary string is
.
Designing a one-dimensional quantizer relies on two probability density functions (PDFs): the background PDF and the genuine user PDF, representing the probability density of the entire population and the genuine user, respectively. Based on the two PDFs, quantization intervals are determined to maximize the detection rate, subject to a given FAR, according to the Neyman-Pearson criterion. So far, a number of one-dimensional quantizers have been proposed [9–11, 14–17], as categorized in Table 1. Quantizers in [9–11] are userindependent, constructed merely from the background PDF, whereas quantizers in [14–17] are user-specific, constructed from both the genuine user PDF and the background PDF. Theoretically, user-specific quantizers provide better verification performances. Particularly, the likelihood ratio-based quantizer [17], among all the quantizers, is optimal in the Neyman-Pearson sense. Quantizers in [9, 14–16] have equal-width intervals. Unfortunately, this leads to potential threats: features obtain higher probabilities in certain quantization intervals than in others, and thus attackers can easily find the genuine interval by continuously guessing the one with the highest probability. To avoid this problem, quantizers in [10, 11, 17] have equal-probability intervals, ensuring i.i.d. bits.
Table 1. The categorized one-dimensional quantizers.
Apart from the one-dimensional quantizer design, some papers focus on assigning a varying number of quantization bits to each feature. So far, several bit allocation principles have been proposed: fixed bit allocation (FBA) [10, 11, 17] simply assigns a fixed number of bits to each feature. On the contrary, the detection rate optimized bit allocation (DROBA) [19] and the area under the FRR curve optimized bit allocation (AUF-OBA) [20], assign a variable number of bits to each feature, according to the features' distinctiveness. Generally, AUF-OBA and DROBA outperform FBA.
In this paper, we deal with quantizer design rather than assigning the quantization bits to features. Although one-dimensional quantizers yield reasonably good performances, a problem remains: independency between all feature dimensions is usually difficult to achieve. Furthermore, one-dimensional quantization leads to inflexible quantization intervals, for instance, the orthogonal boundaries in the two-dimensional feature space, as illustrated in Figure 2(a). Contrarily, two-dimensional quantizers, with an extra degree of freedom, bring more flexible quantizer structures. Therefore, a user-independent pairwise polar quantization was proposed in [21]. The polar quantizer is illustrated in Figure 2(b), where both the magnitude and the phase intervals are determined merely by the background PDF. In principle, polar quantization is less prone to outliers and less strict on independency of the features, when the genuine user PDF is located far from the origin. Therefore, in [21], two pairing strategies, the long-long and the long-short pairing, were proposed for the magnitude and the phase, respectively. Both pairing strategies use the Euclidean distances between each feature's mean and the origin. Results showed that the magnitude yields a poor verification performance, whereas the phase yields a good performance. The two-dimensional quantization-based bit extraction framework, including an extra feature pairing step, is illustrated in Figure 3.
Figure 2. The two-dimensional illustration of (a) the one-dimensional quantizer boundaries (dash
line) and (b) the userindependent polar quantization boundaries (dash line). The genuine user PDF is in red and the background PDF is in blue. The detection rate
and the FAR are the integral of both PDFs in the pink area.
Figure 3. The bits extraction framework based on two-dimensional quantization and coding, where
denotes the number of features;
denotes the number of feature pairs;
denotes the feature index for the
th feature pair (
);
denotes the corresponding quantized bits. The final output binary string is
.
Since the phase quantization has shown in [21] to yield a good performance, in this paper, we propose a user-specific adaptive phase quantizer (APQ). Furthermore, we introduce a Mahalanobis distance-based long-short (LS) pairing strategy that by good approximation maximizes the theoretical overall detection rate at zero Hamming distance threshold.
In Section 2 we introduce the adaptive phase quantizer (APQ), with simulations in a particular case with independent Gaussian densities. In Section 3 the long-short (LS) pairing strategy is introduced to compose pairwise features. In Section 4, we give some experimental results on the FVC2000 fingerprint database and the FRGC face database. In Section 5 the results are discussed and conclusions are drawn in Section 6.
2. Adaptive Phase Quantizer (APQ)
In this section, we first introduce the APQ. Afterwards, we discuss its performance in a particular case where the feature pairs have independent Gaussian densities.
2.1. Adaptive Phase Quantizer (APQ)
The adaptive phase quantization can be applied to a two-dimensional feature vector
if its background PDF is circularly symmetric about the origin. Let
denote a two-dimensional feature vector. The phase
, ranging from
, is defined as its counterclockwise angle from the
-axis. For a genuine user
, a
-bit APQ is then constructed as
(1)
(2)where
represents the
th quantization interval, determined by the quantization step
and an offset angle
. Every quantization interval is uniquely encoded using
bits. Let
be the mean of the genuine feature vector
, then among the intervals, the genuine interval
, which is assigned for the genuine user
, is referred to as
(3)that is,
is the interval where the mean
is located. In Figure 4 we give an illustration of a
-bit APQ.
Figure 4. An illustration of a
-bit APQ in the phase domain, where
,
denotes the
th quantization interval with width
, and offset angle
. The first interval
is wrapped.
The adaptive offset
in (2) is determined by the background PDF
as well as the genuine user PDF
: given both PDFs and an arbitrary offset
, the theoretical detection rate
and the FAR
at zero Hamming distance threshold are
(4)
(5)Given that the background PDF is circularly symmetric, (5) is independent of
. Thus, (5) becomes
(6)Therefore, the optimal
is determined by maximizing the detection rate in (4):
(7)After the
is determined, the quantization intervals are constructed from (2). Additionally,
the detection rate of the APQ is
(8)Essentially, APQ has both equal-width and equal-probability intervals, with rotation
offset
that maximizes the detection rate.
2.2. Simulations on Independent Gaussian Densities
We investigate the APQ performances on synthetic data, in a particular case where
the feature pairs have independent Gaussian densities. That is, the background PDF
of both features are normalized as zero mean and unit variance, that is,
. Similarly, the genuine user PDFs are
and
. Since the two features are independent, the two-dimensional joint background PDF
and the joint genuine user PDF
are
(9)According to (6), the FAR for a
-bit APQ is fixed to
. Therefore, we only have to investigate the detection rate in (8) regarding the genuine
user PDF
, defined by the
and
values. In Figure 5, we show the detection rate
of the
-bit APQ (
, 2, 3, 4), when
is modeled as
;
;
,
, at various
,
locations for optimal
. The white pixels represent high values of the detection rate whilst the black pixels
represent low values. The
appears to depend more on how far the features are from the origin than on the direction
of the features. This is due to the rotation adaptive property. In general, the
is higher when the genuine user PDF has smaller
and larger
for both features. Either decreasing the
or increasing the
deteriorates the performance.
Figure 5. The detection rate of the
-bit APQ (
, 2, 3, 4), when
is modeled as (a)
; (b)
; (c)
,
, at various
,
locations:
. The detection rate ranges from 0 (black) to 1 (white).
To generalize such property, we define a Mahalanobis distance
for feature
as
(10)Given the Mahalanobis distances
,
of two features, we define
for this feature pair as
(11)In Figure 6 we give some simulation results for the relation between
and
. The parameters
and
for the genuine user PDF
are modeled as four
combinations at various
locations. For every
-
setting, we plot its
and
. We observe that the detection rate
tends to increase when the feature pair Mahalanobis distance
increases, although not always monotonically.
Figure 6. The relations between
and
when the genuine user PDF
is modeled as with
and four
,
settings. The result is shown as (a) 1-bit APQ; (b) 2-bit APQ.
We further compare the detection rate of APQ to that of the one-dimensional fixed
quantizer (FQ) [17]. In order to compare with the 2-bit APQ at the same FAR, we choose a 1-bit FQ (
) for every feature dimension. In Figure 7 we show the ratio of their detection rates (
) at various
-
values. The white pixels represent high values whilst the black pixels represent
low values. It is observed that APQ consistently outperforms FQ, especially when the
mean of the genuine user PDF is located far away from the origin and close to the
FQ boundary, namely, the
-axis and
-axis. In fact, the two 1-bit FQ works as a special case of the 2-bit APQ, with
.
Figure 7. The detection rate ratio
of the 2-bit APQ to the 1-bit FQ (
), when
is modeled as (a)
; (b)
,
, with various
,
locations:
. The detection rate ratio ranges from 1 (black) to 2 (white).
3. Biometric Binary String Extraction
The APQ can be directly applied to two-dimensional features, such as Iris [22], while for arbitrary features, we have the freedom to pair the features. In this section, we first formulate the pairing problem, which in practice is difficult to solve. Therefore, we simplify this problem and then propose a long-short pairing strategy (LS) with low computational complexity.
3.1. Problem Formulation
The aim for extracting biometric binary string is for a genuine user
who has
features, we need to determine a strategy to pair these
features into
pairs, in such way that the entire
-bit binary string (
) obtains optimal classification performance, when every feature pair is quantized
by a
-bit APQ. Assuming that the
feature pairs are statistically independent, we know from [19] that when applying a Hamming distance classifier, zero Hamming distance threshold
gives a lower bound for both the detection rate and the FAR. Therefore, we decide
to optimize this lower bound classification performance.
Let
, (
) be the
th pair of feature indices, and
a valid pairing configuration containing
feature index pairs such that every feature index only appears once. For instance,
is not valid because it contains the same feature and therefore cannot be included
in
. Also,
is not a valid pairing configuration because the index value "1" appears twice. The
overall FAR (
) and the overall detection rate (
), at zero Hamming distance threshold are
(12)
(13)where
and
are the FAR and the detection rate for the
th feature pair, computed from (6) and (8). Furthermore, according to (6),
becomes
(14)which is independent of
. Therefore, we only need to search for a user-specific pairing configuration
, that maximizes the overall detection rate in (13). Solving the optimization problem
is formulated as
(15)The detection rate
given a feature pair
is computed from (8). Considering that the performance at zero Hamming distance threshold
indeed pinpoints the minimum FAR and detection rate value on the receiver operating
characteristic curve (ROC), optimizing such point in (15) essentially provides a maximum
lower bound for the ROC curve.
3.2. Long-Short Pairing
There are two problems in solving (15): first, it is often not possible to compute
in (8), due to the difficulties in estimating the genuine user PDF
. Additionally, even if the
can be accurately estimated, a brute-force search would involve
evaluations of the overall detection rate, which renders a brute-force search unfeasible
for realistic values of
. Therefore, we propose to simplify the problem definition in (15) as well as the
optimization searching approach.
Simplified Problem Definition
In Section 2.2 we observed a useful relation between
and
for the APQ: A feature pair with a higher
would approximately also obtain a higher detection rate
for APQ. Therefore, we simplify (15) into
(16)with
defined in (11). Furthermore, instead of brute force searching, we propose a simplified
optimization searching approach: the long-short (LS) pairing strategy.
Long-Short (LS) Pairing
For the genuine user
, sort the set
from largest to smallest into a sequence of ordered feature indices
. The index for the
th feature pair is then
(17)The computational complexity of the LS pairing is only
. Additionally, it is applicable to arbitrary feature types and independent of the
number of quantization bits
. Note that this LS pairing is similar to the pairing strategy proposed in [21], where Euclidean distances are used. In fact, there are other alternative pairing
strategies, for instance greedy or long-long pairing [21]. However, in terms of the entire binary string performance, these methods are not
as good as the approach presented in this paper, especially when
is large. Therefore, in this paper, we choose the long-short pairing strategy, providing
a compromise between the classification performance and computational complexity.
4. Experiments
In this section we test the pairwise phase quantization (LS + APQ) on real data. First
we present a simplified APQ, which is employed in all the experiments. Afterwards,
we verify the relation between
and
for real data. We also show some examples of LS pairing results. Then we investigate
the verification performances while varying the input feature dimensions (
) and the number of quantization bits per feature pair (
). The results are further compared to the one-dimensional fixed quantization (1D
FQ) [17] as well as the the FQ in combined with the DROBA bit allocation principle (FQ +
DROBA).
4.1. Experimental Setup
We tested the pairwise phase quantization on two real data sets: the FVC2000(DB2) fingerprint database [23] and the FRGC(version 1) face database [24].
(i)FVC2000: The FVC2000(DB2) fingerprint data set contains 8 images of 110 users. The features
were extracted in a fingerprint recognition system that was used in [10]. As illustrated in Figure 8, the raw features contain two types of information: the squared directional field
in both
and
directions and the Gabor response in 4 orientations (0,
,
,
). Determined by a regular grid of 16 by 16 points with spacing of 8 pixels, measurements
are taken at 256 positions, leading to a total of 1536 elements.
(ii)FRGC: The FRGC(version 1) face data set contains 275 users with a different number of
images per user, taken under both controlled and uncontrolled conditions. The number
of samples
per user ranges from 4 to 36. The image size was
. From that a region of interest (ROI) with 8762 pixels was taken as illustrated in
Figure 9.
Figure 8. (a) Fingerprint image, (b) directional field, and (c)–(f) the absolute values of Gabor
responses for different orientations
.0


Figure 9. (a) Controlled image, (b) uncontrolled image, (c) landmarks, and (d) the region of
interest (ROI).
A limitation of biometric compression or protection is that it is not possible to conduct the user-specific image alignment, because the image or other alignment information cannot be stored. Therefore, in this paper, we applied basic absolute alignment methods: the fingerprint images are aligned according to a standard core point position; the face images are aligned according to a set of four standard landmarks, that is, eyes, nose and mouth.
We randomly selected different users for training and testing and repeated our experiments
with a number of trials. The data division is described in Table 2, where
is the number of samples per user that varies in the experiments.
Table 2. Data division: number of users × number of samples per user(s), and the number of trials for FVC2000 and FRGC. The s is a parameter that varies in the experiments.
Our experiments involved three steps: training, enrollment, and verification. (1)
In the training step, we first applied a combined PCA/LDA method [25] on a training set. The obtained transformation was then applied to both the enrollment
and verification sets. We assume that the measurements have a Gaussian density, thus
after the PCA transformation, the extracted features are assumed to be statistically
independent. The goal of applying PCA/LDA in the training step is to extract independent
features so that by pairing them we could subsequently obtain independent feature
pairs, which meet our problem requirements. Note that for FVC2000, since we have only
80 users in the training set, applying LDA results in very limited number of features
(e.g.,
). Therefore, we relax the independency requirement for the genuine user by applying
only the PCA transformation. (2) In the enrollment step, for every genuine user
, the LS pairing was first applied, resulting in the user-specific pairing configuration
. The pairwise features were further quantized through a
-bit APQ with the adaptive angle
, and assigned with a Gray code [26]. The concatenation of the codes from
feature pairs formed the
-bit target binary string
. Both
and the quantization information (
) were stored for each genuine user. (3) In the verification step, the features of
the query user were quantized and coded according to the quantization information
(
) of the claimed identity, leading to a query binary string
. Finally, the decision was made by comparing the Hamming distance between the query
and the target string.
4.2. Simplified APQ
In practice, computing the optimal offset angle
for APQ in (7) is difficult, because it is hard to find a closed-form solution
. Besides, it is often impossible to accurately estimate the underlying genuine user
PDF
, due to the limited number of available samples per user. Therefore, instead of
, we propose an approximate solution
. For genuine user
, let the mean of the two-dimensional feature vector be
, and its phase be
, the approximate offset angle
is then computed as
(18)where
. We give an illustration of computing
in Figure 10. The approximate solution
in fact maximizes the product of two Euclidean distances, namely, the distance of
the mean vector
to both the lower and the higher genuine interval boundaries.
Figure 10. An example of a 2-bit simplified APQ, with the background PDF (blue) and the genuine
user PDF (red). The dashed lines are the quantization boundaries.
Note that when the two features have independent Gaussian density with equal standard
deviation,
. Thus, in that case, the simplified APQ equals the original APQ. In Figure 11, we illustrates an example of the detection rate ratio between the simplified and
the original APQ, where both features are modeled as Gaussian with different standard
deviations, for example,
,
. The white pixels represent high values whilst the black pixels represent low values.
Results show that the simplified APQ is only slightly worse than the original APQ
when the mean of the two-dimensional feature
is close to the origin. However, if we apply APQ after the LS pairing, we would expect
that the overall selected pairwise features are located farther away from the origin.
In such cases, the simplified APQ works almost the same as the original APQ. In Figure
12 we illustrate the differences of the rotation angle between the original APQ and
the simplified APQ, computed from (7) and (18), respectively. These differences are
computed from 50 feature pairs for both FVC2000 and FRGC. The results show that there
is no much differences between the rotation angle. Additionally, the simplified APQ
is much simpler, avoiding the problem of estimating the underlying genuine user PDF
. For these reasons, we employed this simplified APQ in all the following experiments
(Section 4.3 to Section 4.5).
Figure 11. The detection rate ratio between the original 2-bit APQ and the simplified APQ, when
is modeled as
,
, with various
,
locations:
. The detection rate ratio scale is
.
Figure 12. The differences of the rotation angle between the original APQ and the simplified
APQ (
), computed from 50 feature pairs, for (a) FVC2000 and (b) FRGC.
4.3. APQ
-
Property
In this section we test the relation between the APQ detection rate
and the pairwise feature's distance
on both data sets. The goal is to see whether the real data exhibit the same
property as we found with synthetic data in Section 2.2: the feature pairs with higher
obtains higher detection rate
.
During the enrollment, for every genuine user, we conducted a random pairing. For
every feature pair, we computed their
value according to (11). Afterwards, we applied the
-bit APQ quantizer to every feature pair. In the verification, for every feature pair,
we computed the Hamming distance between the
-bits from the genuine user and the
-bits from the imposters; that is, we count as a detection if the
-bit genuine query string obtains zero Hamming distance as compared to the target
string. Similarly, we count as a false acceptance if the
-bit imposter query string obtains zero Hamming distance as compared to the target
string. We then repeated this process over all feature pairs as well as all genuine
users, in order to ensure that the results we obtain are neither user or feature biased.
Finally, in Figure 13, we plot the relations between the
and the
. The points we plot are averaged according to the bins of
, when
. Results show that for the real data, the larger
is, consistently the higher detection rate we obtain. Additionally, the FAR performance
is indeed independent of pairing and equals the theoretical value
.
Figure 13. The averaged value of the detection rate and the FAR that correspond to the bins of
, derived from the random pairing and the 2-bit APQ, for (a) FVC2000 and (b) FRGC.
4.4. LS Pairing Performance
In this section we test the LS pairing performances. We give an example of FVC2000
at
. Figure 14(a) shows the histogram of
for all single features over all the genuine users. Around
of them are close to zero, suggesting low quality features. After LS pairing, the
histogram of the pairwise
values are shown in Figure 14(b), as compared with the random pairing. In Figure 14(c), we illustrate the 25 pairwise features in terms of independent Gaussian densities,
for one specific genuine user. Figures 14(b) and 14(c) shows that after LS pairing, a large proportion of feature pairs have relatively
moderate "size" densities and moderate
values. Thus it avoids small
values and effectively maximizes (16).
Figure 14. An example of the LS pairing performance on FVC2000, at
. (a) the histogram of
; (b) the histogram of
for pairwise features and (c) an illustration of the pairwise features as independent
Gaussian density, from both LS and random pairing.
4.5. Verification Performance
We test the performances of LS + APQ at various numbers of input features
as well as various numbers of quantization bits
. The performances are further compared with the one-dimensional fixed quantization
(1D FQ) [17]. The EER results for FVC2000 and FRGC are shown in Table 3 and Figure 15.
Table 3 The EER performances of LS + APQ and 1D FQ, at various feature dimensionality
and various numbers of quantization bits
, for (a) FVC2000 and (b) FRGC.
Figure 15. The EER performances of
-bit (
) LS + APQ at various feature dimensionality
, as compared with the
-bit 1D FQ (
-bit per feature pair), for (a) FVC2000, and (b) FRGC.
Both data sets show that by increasing the number of features
at a fixed
-bit quantization per feature pair, the performances of LS + APQ improves and becomes
stable. Additionally, given
features, the overall performances of LS + APQ are relatively good only when
. However, when
, the performances become poor. For FVC2000, an average of 1-bit per feature pair
gives the lowest EER, while for FRGC, the lowest EER allows 2-bit per feature pair.
In Figure 16, we give their FAR/FRR performances at the best
, with
from 1 to 4, and the FAR/FRR performances at the best
are given in Table 5.
Table 5. The FAR/FRR performances for FVC2000 and FRGC at the best
-
setting.
Figure 16. An example of the FAR/FRR performances (FAR in logarithm) of LS + APQ, with
from 1 to 4, for (a) FVC2000 and (b) FRGC.
We further compare the LS + APQ with the 1D FQ. In order to compare at the same string
length, we compare the
-bit 1D FQ with the
-bit LS + APQ. The EER performances in Figure 15 show that in general when
, LS + APQ outperforms 1D FQ. However, when
, LS + APQ is no longer competitive to 1D FQ. In Figure 17, we give an example of comparing the FAR/FRR performances of LS + APQ and 1D FQ,
on FRGC. Since both APQ and FQ provide equal-probability intervals, they yield almost
the same FAR performance. On the other hand, LS + APQ obtains lower FRR as compared
with 1D FQ.
Figure 17. An example of the FAR/FRR performances of LS + APQ and 1D FQ, at
,
for FRGC.
In [19], it was shown that FQ in combination with the DROBA adaptive bit allocation principle
(FQ + DROBA) provides considerably good performances. Therefore, we compare the LS
+ APQ with the FQ + DROBA. In order to compare both methods at the same
-
setting, for LS + APQ, we extract only
features from the
features, thus
pairs from the LS pairing. Afterwards, we apply the 2-bit APQ for every feature pair
(see Figure 3). In this case,
. Table 6 shows the EER performances of LS + APQ and FQ + DROBA at several different
-
settings. Results show that LS + APQ obtains slightly better performances than FQ
+ DROBA.
Table 5 The EER performances of LS + APQ and FQ + DROBA, at at several
-
settings, for (a) FVC2000 and (b) FRGC.
5. Discussion
Essentially, the pairwise phase quantization involves two user-specific adaptation
steps: the long-short (LS) pairing, as well as the adaptive phase quantization (APQ).
From the pairing's perspective, although we only quantize the phase, the magnitude
information (i.e. the feature mean) is not discarded. Instead, it is employed in the
LS pairing strategy to facilitate extracting distinctive phase bits. Additionally,
although with low computational complexity, the LS pairing strategy is effective for
arbitrary feature densities. From the quantizer's perspective, quantizing in phase
domain has the advantage that a circularly symmetric two-dimensional feature density
results in a simple uniform phase density. Additionally, we apply user-specific phase
adaptation. As a result, the extracted phase bits are not only distinctive but also
robust to over-fitting. However, the experimental results imply that such advantages
only exist when
. To summarize, as illustrated in Figure 18, the LS pairing is a user-specific resampling procedure that provides simple unform
but distinctive phase densities. The APQ further enhances the feature distinctiveness
by adjusting the user-specific phase quantization intervals.
Figure 18. An example of the feature density based on LS pairing and APQ. (a) The two-dimensional feature density; (b) the density of
; (c) the density of
; (d) the pairwise phase density of
, with the adaptive quantization boundaries (dashed line).
6. Conclusion
Extracting binary biometric strings is a fundamental step in biometric compression and template protection. Unlike many previous work which quantize features individually, in this paper, we propose a pairwise adaptive phase quantization (APQ), together with a long-short (LS) pairing strategy, which aims to maximize the overall detection rate. Experimental results on the FVC2000 and the FRGC database show reasonably good verification performances.
Acknowledgment
This research is supported by the research program Sentinels (http://www.sentinels.nl/). Sentinels is being financed by Technology Foundation STW, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), and the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs.
References
-
AK Jain, K Nandakumar, A Nagar, Biometric template security. EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing 2008 (2008)
-
NK Ratha, JH Connell, RM Bolle, Enhancing security and privacy in biometrics-based authentication systems. IBM Systems Journal 40(3), 614–634 (2001)
-
NK Ratha, S Chikkerur, JH Connell, RM Bolle, Generating cancelable fingerprint templates. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 29(4), 561–572 (2007). PubMed Abstract | Publisher Full Text
-
A Juels, M Sudan, A fuzzy vault scheme. Designs, Codes, and Cryptography 38(2), 237–257 (2006). Publisher Full Text
-
K Nandakumar, AK Jain, S Pankanti, Fingerprint-based fuzzy vault: implementation and performance. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security 2(4), 744–757 (2007)
-
A Juels, M Wattenberg, Fuzzy commitment scheme. Proceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ACM CCS '99), November 1999, 28–36
-
Y Dodis, L Reyzin, A Smith, Fuzzy extractors: how to generate strong keys from biometrics and other noisy data. Proceedings of International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques, May 2004, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3027, 523–540
-
EC Chang, S Roy, Robust extraction of secret bits from minutiae. Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Biometrics (ICB '07), 2007, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4642, 750–759
-
J-P Linnartz, P Tuyls, New shielding functions to enhance privacy and prevent misuse of biometrie templates. Proceedings of Audio-and Video-Based Biometrie Person Authentication (AVBPA '03), 2003, Guildford, UK, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2688, 393–402
-
P Tuyls, AHM Akkermans, TAM Kevenaar, G-J Schrijen, AM Bazen, RNJ Veldhuis, Practical biometric authentication with template protection. Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Audio-and Video-Based Biometric Person Authentication (AVBPA '05), July 2005, Hilton Rye Town, NY, USA, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3546, 436–446
-
TAM Kevenaar, GJ Schrijen, M van der Veen, AHM Akkermans, F Zuo, Face recognition with renewable and privacy preserving binary templates. Proceedings of the 4th IEEE Workshop on Automatic Identification Advanced Technologies (AUTO ID '05), October 2005, New York, NY, USA, 21–26
-
F Hao, R Anderson, J Daugman, Combining crypto with biometrics effectively. IEEE Transactions on Computers 55(9), 1081–1088 (2006)
-
ABJ Teoh, A Goh, DCL Ngo, Random multispace quantization as an analytic mechanism for BioHashing of biometric and random identity inputs. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 28(12), 1882–1901 (2006). PubMed Abstract | Publisher Full Text
-
C Vielhauer, R Steinmetz, A Mayerhöfer, Biometric hash based on statistical features of online signatures. Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR '02), 2002, Quebec, Canada 1, 123–126
-
H Feng, CC Wah, Private key generation from on-line handwritten signatures. Information Management and Computer Security 10(4), 159–164 (2002). Publisher Full Text
-
Y-J Chang, W Zhang, T Chen, Biometrics-based cryptographic key generation. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME '01), June 2004, Taipei, Taiwan 3, 2203–2206
-
C Chen, RNJ Veldhuis, TAM Kevenaar, AHM Akkermans, Multi-bits biometric string generation based on the likelihood ratio. Proceedings of the 1st IEEE International Conference on Biometrics: Theory, Applications, and Systems (BTAS '07), September 2007
-
C Chen, RNJ Veldhuis, TAM Kevenaar, AHM Akkermans, Biometric binary string generation with detection mate optimized bit allocation. Proceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPR '08), June 2008
-
C Chen, RNJ Veldhuis, TAM Kevenaar, AHM Akkermans, Biometric quantization through detection rate optimized bit allocation. EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing 2009 (2009)
-
C Chen, RNJ Veldhuis, Extracting biometric binary strings with minimal area under the frr curve for the hamming distance classifier. Proceedings of the 17th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO '09), 2009
-
C Chen, R Veldhuis, Binary biometric representation through pairwise polar quantization. Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Advances in Biometrics (ICB '09), June 2009, Alghero, Italy, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 5558, 72–81
-
J Daugman, The importance of being random: statistical principles of iris recognition. Pattern Recognition 36(2), 279–291 (2003). Publisher Full Text
-
D Maio, D Maltoni, R Cappelli, JL Wayman, AK Jain, FVC2000: fingerprint verification competition. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 24(3), 402–412 (2002). Publisher Full Text
-
PJ Phillips, PJ Flynn, T Scruggs, KW Bowyer, J Chang, K Hoffman, J Marques, J Min, W Worek, Overview of the face recognition grand challenge. Proceedings of IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR '05), June 2005, San Diego, Calif, USA, 947–954
-
R Veldhuis, A Bazen, J Kauffman, P Hartel, Biometric verification based on grip-pattern recognition. Security, Steganography, and Watermaking of Multimedia Contents VI, January 2004, San Jose, Calif, USA, Proceedings of SPIE 5306, 634–641
-
M Gardner, The Binary Gray Code (W. H. Freeman, New York, NY, USA, 1986)




