da/sec scientific talk on Biometrics

Topic: Towards Bloom Filter-based Indexing of Iris Biometric Data

by Christian Rathgeb
FBI D14/0.13, December 04, 2014 (Thursday), 12.00 noon

Keywords — Biometrics, Iris Recognition, Biometric Indexing

Abstract

Conventional biometric identification systems require exhaustive 1:N comparisons in order to identify a biometric probe, i.e. comparison time frequently dominates the overall computational workload. Biometric database indexing represents a challenging task since biometric data does not exhibit any natural sorting order.

In this paper we present a preliminary study on the feasibility of applying Bloom filters for the purpose of iris biometric database indexing. It is shown that, by constructing a binary tree data structure of Bloom filters extracted from binary iris biometric templates (iris-codes), the search space can be reduced to O(log N). In experiments, which are carried out on a medium-sized database of N = 256 subjects, biometric performance (accuracy) is maintained for different conventional identification systems. Further, perspectives on how to employ the proposed scheme on large-scale databases are given.