Optics based biohashing using joint transform correlator

Most authentication process uses password and personal identification numbers (PIN) for security purposes. In order to remove the problem of hacking or stealing of the password and PIN numbers, there has been an increased interest in the utilization of specific biometric feature of the user. Recently, biohashing systems have been introduced for automatic biometric recognition. In a biohashing system, biohash codes are generated using the feature of the biometric. A basic biohashing system involves two steps. First is the extraction of the feature from the input biometric image and second is the discretisation of the obtained feature vector by using ortho-normalized random numbers. In this paper, a new biohashing system has been proposed in which joint transform correlator (JTC) has been used for extraction of the specific feature of the biometric. In the enrolment process, a biohash code has been generated by using a single face image and then stored. In the verification process, this biohash code is matched with the verification codes for recognition purpose. The main advantage of the proposed biohashing method is the possibility of the optical implementation of the feature extraction of the face image. Experimental as well as simulation results have been given to validate the proposed technique. Normalized Hamming distance has been calculated to discriminate the genuine and impostor face images. By varying the dimension of the feature matrix, the study of the variation of the normalized Hamming distance with the density of the population has been undertaken. For the performance evaluation of the proposed technique the false rejection ratio (FRR) and false acceptance ratio (FAR) have also been calculated.