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Biometric systems have been recently developed and used for authentication or identification in several scenarios, ranging from institutional purposes (border control) to commercial applications (point of sale). Two main issues are raised when such systems are applied: reliability and privacy for users. Multi-biometric systems, i.e. systems involving more than a biometric trait, increase the security of the system, but threaten users' privacy, which are compelled to release an increased amount of sensible information. In this paper, we propose a multi-biometric system, which allows the extraction of secure identifiers and ensures that the stored information does not compromise the privacy of users' biometrics. Furthermore, we show the practicality of our approach, by describing an effective construction, based on the combination of two iris templates and we present the resulting experimental data.

The paper presents a novel approach to identify the minutiae present in a fingerprint image based on the analysis of the local properties. The typical patterns of minutiae called ridge termination and bifurcation are identified by studying the intensity along squared paths in the image. The presented algorithm works both on grey-level image and binarized image and, despite its simplicity, it achieves good accuracy and it can be a good candidate to be implemented in hardware or executed on simple hardware architectures, for example in biometric systems embedded in portable applications such as cellular phones and smart cards.

Biometric features are increasingly used for authentication and identification purposes in a broad variety of institutional and commercial systems, such as e-government, e-banking and e-commerce applications. On the other side, the adoption of biometric techniques is restrained by a rising concern regarding the protection of the biometrics templates. In fact, people are not generally keen to give out biometric traits with little assurance that they cannot be stolen or used without an expressed consent. Recent results showed that generating a unique identifier by combining biometric traits making it impossible to recover the original biometric features (thus preserving the privacy of the biometric traits) is feasible. The chapter reviews the privacy issues related to the use of biometrics and presents some of the most advanced techniques available up to date, providing a comparative analysis. and giving an overview on future trends.