Hi,

After the last Bob meeting last week, I was wondering if we could develop a new pipeline for biometric template protection (BTP) schemes. For a better understanding of the concept of BTP, I have reviewed it hereunder:

• Review to Biometric Systems As you know, each biometric recognition system has some main parts:

1. Feature extraction,
2. System Database (to store biometric features during enrollment),
3. Matching, and Scoring.

• Motivation to BTP: A very crucial concern is that if the biometric templates which are stored at the system's database are compromised, it can cause crucial challenges for the user's privacy:

  • the attacker can use the unprotected templates and impersonate to hack the recognition system.
  • more important: since biometric data are unique if (unprotected) biometric features are compromised, they can not be revoked! Therefore, the attacker can use the person's biometric features to attack any other biometric systems.

• How do BTP schemes work in general? To explain the process in general without going into details, BTP schemes aim to generate protected templates, and then make the recognition according to the protected templates. A very simple setup can be a transformation after the feature extraction stage to generate protected templates and also new algorithms for comparing and matching.

Considering different setup of the biometric recognition systems secured with BTP schemes, it can be useful to create and develop a new pipeline in Bob for such systems, e.g., in bob.bio.btp.

@vkrivokuca @tiago.pereira