Proof-of-Concept of Polar Codes for Biometric Identification and Authentication

In this work, a complete biometrics identification and authentication system considered in [1] is implemented. In the considered system, polar codes are applied and binary symmetric memoryless channels are used for noisy enrollment and observation. The fundamental limits can be achieved with sufficiently long block length for iid binary source sequence. Fingerprints are used as the biometric source and an autoencoder is designed for pre-processing so that images are compressed to nearly uniformly distributed binary sequences with similar correlation and entropy properties to iid binary sequence. The identification and authentication system with generated secret key in [1] is implemented and simulated using pre-processed fingerprints as biometric source and polar code-based design. The proposed system design approach is systematic and flexible in choosing the optimal trade-off. The results show that identification error rates become smaller with longer code length and when the successive cancellation list algorithm is applied. Thus, it is shown by these first promising experiments that polar codes can be used in real identification and authentication systems.