Privacy Protection of Fingerprint Database

A fingerprint authentication system for the privacy protection of the fingerprint template stored in a database is introduced here. The considered fingerprint data is a binary thinned fingerprint image, which will be embedded with some private user information without causing obvious abnormality in the enrollment phase. In the authentication phase, these hidden user data can be extracted from the stored template for verifying the authenticity of the person who provides the query fingerprint. A novel data hiding scheme is proposed for the thinned fingerprint template. This scheme does not produce any boundary pixel in the thinned fingerprint during data embedding. Thus, the abnormality caused by data hiding is visually imperceptible in the marked-thinned fingerprint. Compared with using existing binary image data hiding techniques, the proposed method causes the least abnormality for a thinned fingerprint without compromising the performance of the fingerprint identification.