Efficient iris sample data protection using selective JPEG2000 encryption of normalised texture

Abstract

Biometrie system security requires cryptographic protection of sample data under certain circumstances. We assess low complexity selective encryption schemes applied to JPEG2000 compressed iris data by conducting iris recognition on the selectively encrypted data. This paper specifically investigates the effect of applying the approach to normalised texture data instead of original sample data in order to further reduce the amount of data to be processed (i.e. compressed and encrypted). Result generalisability is facilitated by the employment of four different iris feature extraction schemes and the systematic consideration of three encryption variants. Depending on the applied iris recognition scheme, protection equivalent to full encryption can be achieved when encrypting 1/60–1/12 of the data amount of a full iris sample encoded in a JPEG2000 file.