Transforming minutiae for protecting fingerprint data

Fingerprint is one of popular biometric identifiers for authenticating users. Its permanence characteristic has made it reliable to use. Therefore, fingerprint data should be protected and not be disclosed to unauthorized parties. Neverthelless, its instability scanning result has made conventional cryptographic algorithms do not work. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for protecting fingerprint data by transforming it before being stored in a database. Once it has been transformed, it is hard to reconstruct its original data. In the authentication process, the fingerprint is also transformed in the same way as its registration. So, the original data have never been revealed. The experimental result, which is done by using a public database, shows that the error rate caused by the transformation is relatively low.