View article

A person only has two irises - if his pattern is stolen he quickly runs out of alternatives. Thus methods that protect the true iris pattern need to be adopted in practical biometric applications. In particular, it is desirable to have a system that can generate a new unique pattern if the one being used is lost, or generate different unique patterns for different applications to prevent cross-matching. For backwards compatibility, these patterns should look like plausible irises so they can be handled with the same processing tools. However, they should also non-invertibly hide the true biometric so it is never exposed, or even stored. In this paper four such “cancelable” biometric methods are proposed that work with conventional iris recognition systems, either at the unwrapped image level or at the binary iris code level.