Increasing error tolerance in biometric systems
Parman Sukarno, Mieng Quoc Phu, Nandita Bhattacharjee, Bala Srinivasan · 2010
Using biometrics for authentication or cryptosystems would require tolerance of errors of the order of 40%. Most of the proposed techniques either use the reliable bits of a biometric or good quality biometric which does not have such a large variation. However, biometric authentication can be viewed as a design of error correcting codes wherein the redundancy provides the tolerance to errors. This paper explores addition of redundancy to support variations as high as 40% in biometrics. We investigated the error characteristics of biometric templates and found that some blocks within the template tend to produce errors higher than the mean error. To handle this behavior we propose a two level correction. We extensively tested our proposed method using iris images from the commercial Bath dataset [13] and found that the proposed method can tolerate the errors with a success rate of 99.07%, while not accepting any imposters.