Template protection for HMM-based on-line signature authentication

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. E. Maiorana, P. Campisi, M. Martínez-Díaz, J. Ortega-García, A. Neri, "Template protection for HMM-based on-line signature authentication" in IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops CVPRW, Anchorage, AK (USA), 2008, pp. 1-6.
The security of biometric data is a very important issue in the deployment of biometric-based recognition systems. In this paper, we propose a signature-based biometric authentication system, where signal processing techniques are applied to the acquired on-line signature in order to generate protected templates, from which retrieving the original data is computationally as hard as randomly guessing them. A hidden Markov model (HMM)-based matching strategy is employed to compare the transformed signatures. The proposed protected authentication system generates a score as the result of the matching process, thus allowing to implement protected multibiometric recognition systems, through the application of score-fusion techniques. The experimental results show that, at the cost of only a slight performance reduction, the desired protection for the employed biometric templates can be properly achieved.