Abstract: The success fingerprint combination and their extensive deployment all over the world have prompted some individuals to take extreme measures to evade identification by altering their fingerprints. The problem of fingerprint alteration or obfuscation is very different from that of fingerprint spoofing, where an individual uses a fake fingerprint in order to adopt the identity of another individual. While the problem of spoofing has received substantial attention in the literature, the problem of obfuscation has not been addressed in the biometric literature, in spite of numerous documented cases of fingerprint alteration for the purpose of evading identification. We introduce a novel system for fingerprint privacy protection by combining two fingerprints into a new identity. In the enrolment, the system captures two fingerprints from two different fingers. The algorithm based on the features extracted from the orientation field and minutiae satisfies the three essential requirements for alteration detection algorithm.

Keywords: Minutiae, Orientation, Template, Fingerprint combination.