Biometric recognition offers a reliable solution to the problem of user authentication in identity management systems. With the widespread deployment of biometric systems in various applications, there are increasing concerns about the security and privacy of biometric technology. Public acceptance of biometrics technology will depend on the ability of system designers to demonstrate that these systems are robust, have low error rates, and are tamper proof. We present a high-level categorization of the various vulnerabilities of a biometric system and discuss countermeasures that have been proposed to address these vulnerabilities. In particular, we focus on biometric template security which is an important issue because, unlike passwords and tokens, compromised biometric templates cannot be revoked and reissued. Protecting the template is a challenging task due to intrauser variability in the acquired biometric traits. We present an overview of various biometric template protection schemes and discuss their advantages and limitations in terms of security, revocability, and impact on matching accuracy. A template protection scheme with provable security and acceptable recognition performance has thus far remained elusive. Development of such a scheme is crucial as biometric systems are beginning to proliferate into the core physical and information infrastructure of our society.

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Biometric template security

Establishing identity is becoming critical in our vastly interconnected society. Questions such as "Is she really who she claims to be?," "Is this person authorized to use this facility?," or "Is he in the watchlist posted by the government?" are routinely being posed in a variety of scenarios ranging from issuing a driver's license to gaining entry into a country. The need for reliable user authentication techniques has increased in the wake of heightened concerns about security and rapid advancements in networking, communication, and mobility. Biometrics, described as the science of recognizing an individual based on his or her physical or behavioral traits, is beginning to gain acceptance as a legitimate method for determining an individual's identity. Biometric systems have now been deployed in various commercial, civilian, and forensic applications as a means of establishing identity. In this paper, we provide an overview of biometrics and discuss some of the salient research issues that need to be addressed for making biometric technology an effective tool for providing information security. The primary contribution of this overview includes: 1) examining applications where biometric scan solve issues pertaining to information security; 2) enumerating the fundamental challenges encountered by biometric systems in real-world applications; and 3) discussing solutions to address the problems of scalability and security in large-scale authentication systems.

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Biometrics: a tool for information security

With an increasing emphasis on security, automated personal identification based on biometrics has been receiving extensive attention over the past decade. Iris recognition, as an emerging biometric recognition approach, is becoming a very active topic in both research and practical applications. In general, a typical iris recognition system includes iris imaging, iris liveness detection, and recognition. This paper focuses on the last issue and describes a new scheme for iris recognition from an image sequence. We first assess the quality of each image in the input sequence and select a clear iris image from such a sequence for subsequent recognition. A bank of spatial filters, whose kernels are suitable for iris recognition, is then used to capture local characteristics of the iris so as to produce discriminating texture features. Experimental results show that the proposed method has an encouraging performance. In particular, a comparative study of existing methods for iris recognition is conducted on an iris image database including 2,255 sequences from 213 subjects. Conclusions based on such a comparison using a nonparametric statistical method (the bootstrap) provide useful information for further research.

Personal identification based on iris texture analysis

Unlike other biometrics such as fingerprints and face, the distinct aspect of iris comes from randomly distributed features. This leads to its high reliability for personal identification, and at the same time, the difficulty in effectively representing such details in an image. This paper describes an efficient algorithm for iris recognition by characterizing key local variations. The basic idea is that local sharp variation points, denoting the appearing or vanishing of an important image structure, are utilized to represent the characteristics of the iris. The whole procedure of feature extraction includes two steps: 1) a set of one-dimensional intensity signals is constructed to effectively characterize the most important information of the original two-dimensional image; 2) using a particular class of wavelets, a position sequence of local sharp variation points in such signals is recorded as features. We also present a fast matching scheme based on exclusive OR operation to compute the similarity between a pair of position sequences. Experimental results on 2 255 iris images show that the performance of the proposed method is encouraging and comparable to the best iris recognition algorithm found in the current literature.

/pdf/efficient-iris-recognition-by-characterizing-key-local-4jqq8fzh1p.pdf

Efficient iris recognition by characterizing key local variations

https://www.cse.msu.edu/~rossarun/BiometricsTextBook/Papers/Iris/Bowyer_ImageUndIris_CVIU07.pdf

Image understanding for iris biometrics: A survey

Proposes a method for personal identification based on iris recognition. The method consists of three major components: image preprocessing, feature extraction and classifier design. A bank of circular symmetric filters is used to capture local iris characteristics to form a fixed length feature vector. In iris matching, an efficient approach called nearest feature line (NFL) is used. Constraints are imposed on the original NFL method to improve performance. Experimental results show that the proposed method has an encouraging performance.

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Iris recognition using circular symmetric filters

A new approach for personal identification based on iris recognition is presented in this paper The body of this paper details the steps of iris recognition, including image preprocessing, feature extraction and classifier design The proposed algorithm uses a bank of Gabor filters to capture both local and global iris characteristics to form a fixed length feature vector Iris matching is based on the weighted Euclidean distance between the two corresponding iris vectors and is therefore very fast Experimental results are reported to demonstrate the performance of the algorithm

/pdf/iris-recognition-based-on-multichannel-gabor-filtering-52c8h6zg65.pdf

Iris Recognition Based on Multichannel Gabor Filtering

http://www.cbsr.ia.ac.cn/publications/lma/PR2004.pdf

Li Ma

Papers

Personal identification based on iris texture analysis

Efficient iris recognition by characterizing key local variations

Iris recognition using circular symmetric filters

Iris Recognition Based on Multichannel Gabor Filtering

Local intensity variation analysis for iris recognition