Face and ear fusion template protection based on fuzzy vaults

Due to biological characteristic similarity in image acquisition and physiological complementarity of the face and the ear, a face and ear multimodal fusion template protection method was proposed, in which the face and the ear were combined in the feature level and then a fuzzy vault was utilized to protect the fusion feature template. The basic flow of the scheme was divided into 5 parts:image preprocessing, Gabor-PCA feature extraction, feature fusion, fusion template encryption, and fusion template decryp-tion. On the multimodal image dataset consisted of the ORL face dataset and the USTB ear dataset 3, authentication experimental re-sults show the effectiveness of the proposed fusion template protection method. Also the fusion template protection method outperforms the unimodal template protection method on both genuine accept rate and false accept rate.