Polar Codes for Biometric Identification Systems

Abstract: Biometrics are widely used in identification systems, such as face, fingerprint, iris, etc. Polar code is the only code that can be strictly proved to achieve channel capacity, and it has been proved to be optimal for channel and source coding. In this degree project, our goal is to apply polar codes algorithms to biometric identification systems, and to design a biometric identification system with high identification accuracy, low system complexity, and good privacy preservation. This degree project has carried out specific and in-depth research in four aspects, following results are achieved: First, idea of polar codes is learnt, for example channel combination, channel splitting, successive cancellation decoding. The successive cancellation and successive cancellation list algorithm are also applied to encoding, which further realizes polar codes for source coding. Second, using autoencoder to process biometrics. Autoencoder is introduced to compress fingerprints into binary sequences of length 1024, it has 5 encoding layers and 12 decoding layers, achieved reconstruction error is 0.03. The distribution is close to Gaussian distribution, and compressed codes are quantized into binary sequences. Properties of sequences are similar with random sequences in terms of entropy, correlation, variance. Third, the identification system under Wyner-Ziv problem is studied with fingerprints. In enrollment phase, encoding algorithms are designed to compress biometrics, and in identification phase, decoding algorithms are designed to estimate the original sequence based on decoded results and noisy sequence. Maximum mutual information method is used to identify users. Results show that with smaller number of users, longer code length, smaller noise, then recognition error rate is lower. Fourth, human faces are used in the generated secret key system. After fully considering the trade off to achieve optimal results, in enrollment phase both public data and secure data are generated, in identification phase user’s index and secret key are estimated. A hierarchical structure is further studied. First, CNN is used to classify the age of faces, and then the generated secret key system is used for identification after narrowing the range. The system complexity is reduced by 80% and the identification accuracy is not reduced.