Biometric-based optical systems for security and authentication

Abstract

In a digital world, biometric authentication is becoming more and more popular for reliable automatic recognition of people, which is widely being deployed in optical information security-related systems. The adoption of biometrics into optical security-based applications and fields has been adding excellent security due to their distinctive attribute that gains from optics. In this chapter, we present an optical nonlinear cryptosystem for image encryption using biometric keys generated from fingerprint hologram for security and authentication. In order to generate biometric keys, we implemented an optoelectronics experiment setup using digital holography for capturing the fingerprint hologram, storing, and then numerically reconstructing it. The reconstructed features of the fingerprint object offer very appealing attributes from the perspective of data encryption such as uniqueness, randomness, and discriminability. Fingerprint biometric features are kept inside interference patterns optically, which are also protected with experimental parameters. If both pieces of information are provided to be known to the person at the decryption stage, as a result, it keeps maintaining user specificity in order to access system information. Furthermore, we exploit the utility of the biometric key in designing an optical cryptosystem for encrypting the information which offers a solution to the distribution of keys with heightened security.