Absolute fingerprint pre-alignment in minutiae-based cryptosystems

Most biometric cryptosystems that have been proposed to protect fingerprint minutiae make use of public alignment helper data. This, however, has the inadvertent effect of information leakage about the protected templates. A countermeasure to avoid auxiliary alignment data is to protect absolutely pre-aligned fingerprints. As a proof of concept, we run performance evaluations of a minutiae fuzzy vault with an automatic method for absolute pre-alignment. Therefore, we propose a new method for estimating a fingerprint's directed reference point by modeling the local orientation around the core as a tented arch.