BRIEFBCS: binary robust independent elementary features based fuzzy vault scheme in BCS.

Biometric cryptosystem (BCS) is an emerging field which performs user authentication in a secured environment. User authentication is handled using Biometrics and security using Cryptography, thus together forms BCS. Furthermore, the use of biometrics eliminates the need to remember passwords. The features extracted from the user's biometric are used in place of a password for user authentication. BCS unleashes the key from the secured place upon successful user authentication. This paper proposes a novel method called binary robust independent elementary features based biometric cryptosystem (BRIEFBCS) for biometric key generation. The proposed method relies on a well known cryptographic construct, Fuzzy vault scheme, for data security. The motivation behind using BRIEF scheme for biometric cryptosystem is that the obtained descriptor are compact in size, faster to implement and suitable for low memory devices. BRIEFBCS comprises of three levels, i.e., Key generation, Enrollment and Authentication. The experiments have been carried on five ear databases viz. AMI, CP, IITD-v1, IITD-v2 and USTB-v2. The proposed method's performance is evaluated and compared to state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy, false reject rate, vault construction time, key recovery time and Receiver Operating Characteristics curve. The proposed method has been demonstrated to outperform numerous state-of-the-art methods in both qualitative and quantitative aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]