A novel cancellable Iris template generation based on salting approach

The iris has been vastly recognized as one of the powerful biometrics in terms of recognition performance, both theoretically and empirically. However, traditional unprotected iris biometric recognition schemes are highly vulnerable to numerous privacy and security attacks. Several methods have been proposed to generate cancellable iris templates that can be used for recognition; however, these templates achieve lower accuracy of recognition in comparison to traditional unprotected iris templates. In this paper, a novel cancellable iris recognition scheme based on the salting approach is introduced. It depends on mixing the original binary iris code with a synthetic pattern using XOR operation. This scheme guarantees a high degree of privacy/security preservation without affecting the performance accuracy compared to the unprotected traditional iris recognition schemes. Comprehensive experiments on various iris image databases demonstrate similar accuracy to those of the original counterparts. Hence, robustness to several major privacy/security attacks is guaranteed.