Obtaining Cryptographic Keys Using Feature Level Fusion of Iris and Face Biometrics for Secure User Authentication

Biometric traits are permanently associated with a user. Though this is an advantage from identity verification point of view, if such biometric data is compromised, it cannot be replaced by a new one and becomes unusable in the system. This limitation can be overcome by combining biometrics with cryptographic techniques to induce revocability in biometric systems. In this paper, a multi-biometrics based cryptographic key regeneration scheme is proposed which combines information from iris and face to obtain a long cryptographic key having high entropy. The biometric information fusion is carried in feature domain using weighted feature level fusion technique.