Spectral Minutiae Representations for Fingerprint Recognition

Nowadays, biometric technology is increasingly deployed in civil and commercial applications. The growing use of biometrics is raising security and privacy concerns about the biometric technology. Storing biometric data, known as biometric templates, in a database leads to several privacy risks such as identity fraud and cross matching. A solution is to apply biometric template protection techniques, which aim to make it impossible to recover the biometric data from the templates. The research question addressed in this thesis is how to combine fingerprint recognition systems with template protection. To answer this question, this thesis introduces the Spectral Minutiae Representation method, which enables the combination of a minutiae-based fingerprint recognition system with template protection schemes based on fuzzy commitment or helper data schemes.