A Novel Retina based Biometric Privacy using Visual Cryptography

Biometrics deal with automated methods of identifying a person or verifying the identity of a person based on physiological or behavioral characteristics. Preserving the biometric privacy such as digital biometric data (eg. face, iris, retina and fingerprint) is very important nowadays. The retinal biometrics is considered one of the most accurate and robust methods of the identity verification. The unique retina features of an individual can be presented in a compact binary form which can be easily compared with the reference template to confirm identity. As biometric template are stored in the centralized database, due to security threats biometric template may be modified by attacker. If biometric template is altered authorized user will not be allowed to access the resource. To deal this issue visual cryptography schemes can be applied to secure the iris template. Visual cryptography is a secret sharing scheme where a secret image is encrypted into the shares which independently disclose no information about the original secret image. The combination of biometrics and visual cryptography is a promising information security technique which offers an efficient way to protect the biometric template. Visual cryptography provides great means for helping such security needs as well as extra layer of authentication.