Iris-Biometric Fuzzy Commitment Schemes under Image Compression

With the introduction of template protection techniques, privacy and security of biometric data have been enforced. Meeting the required properties of irreversibility, i.e. avoiding a reconstruction of original biometric features, and unlinkability among each other, template protection can enhance security of existing biometric systems in case tokens are stolen. However, with increasing resolution and number of enrolled users in biometric systems, means to compress biometric signals become an imminent need and practice, raising questions about the impact of image compression on recognition accuracy of template protection schemes, which are particularly sensitive to any sort of signal degradation. An assessment of such impact of image compression applied to iris-biometric fuzzy commitment schemes and their robustness for compression noise is therefore interesting and subject of this paper. Experiments using a fuzzy commitment scheme indicate, that medium compression does not drastically effect key retrieval performance.