Secure Triplet Loss for End-to-End Deep Biometrics

Although deep learning is being widely adopted for every topic in pattern recognition, its use for secure and cancelable biometrics is currently reserved for feature extraction and biometric data preprocessing, limiting achievable performance. In this paper, we propose a novel formulation of the triplet loss methodology, designated as secure triplet loss, that enables biometric template cancelability with end-to-end convolutional neural networks, using easily changeable keys. Trained and evaluated for electrocardiogram-based biometrics, the network revealed easy to optimize using the modified triplet loss and achieved superior performance when compared with the state- of-the-art (10.63% equal error rate with data from 918 subjects of the UofTDB database). Additionally, it ensured biometric template security and effective template cancelability. Although further efforts are needed to avoid template linkability, the proposed secure triplet loss shows promise in template cancelability and non-invertibility for biometric recognition while taking advantage of the full power of convolutional neural networks.