Noninvertible Minutia Cylinder-Code Representation

Although several fingerprint template protection methods have been proposed in the literature, the problem is still unsolved, since enforcing non-reversibility tends to produce an excessive drop in accuracy. Furthermore, unlike fingerprint verification, whose performance is nowadays assessed with public benchmarks and protocols, performance of template protection approaches is often evaluated in heterogeneous scenarios, thus making it very difficult to compare existing techniques. In this paper we propose a novel protection technique for MCC, which is a well-known local minutiae representation. A sophisticate algorithm is designed to reverse MCC (i.e., recovering original minutiae positions and angles). Systematic experimentations show that the new approach compares favorably with state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and, at the same time, provides a good protection of minutiae information and is robust against masquerade attacks