Towards Better Performance for Protected Iris Biometric System with Confidence Matrix

Biometric template protection (BTP) schemes are implemented to increase public confidence in biometric systems regarding data privacy and security in recent years. The introduction of BTP has naturally incurred loss of information for security, which leads to performance degradation at the matching stage. Although efforts are shown in the extended work of some iris BTP schemes to improve their recognition performance, there is still a lack of a generalized solution for this problem. In this paper, a trainable approach that requires no further modification on the protected iris biometric templates has been proposed. This approach consists of two strategies to generate a confidence matrix to reduce the performance degradation of iris BTP schemes. The proposed binary confidence matrix showed better performance in noisy iris data, whereas the probability confidence matrix showed better performance in iris databases with better image quality. In addition, our proposed scheme has also taken into consideration the potential effects in recognition performance, which are caused by the database-associated noise masks and the variation in biometric data types produced by different iris BTP schemes. The proposed scheme has reported remarkable improvement in our experiments with various publicly available iris research databases being tested.