ColorVein: Colorful Cancelable Vein Biometrics

Vein recognition technologies have become one of the primary solutions for high-security identification systems. However, the issue of biometric information leakage can still pose a serious threat to user privacy and anonymity. Currently, there is no cancelable biometric template generation scheme specifically designed for vein biometrics. Therefore, this paper proposes an innovative cancelable vein biometric generation scheme: ColorVein. Unlike previous cancelable template generation schemes, ColorVein does not destroy the original biometric features and introduces additional color information to grayscale vein images. This method significantly enhances the information density of vein images by transforming static grayscale information into dynamically controllable color representations through interactive colorization. ColorVein allows users/administrators to define a controllable pseudo-random color space for grayscale vein images by editing the position, number, and color of hint points, thereby generating protected cancelable templates. Additionally, we propose a new secure center loss to optimize the training process of the protected feature extraction model, effectively increasing the feature distance between enrolled users and any potential impostors. Finally, we evaluate ColorVein’s performance on all types of vein biometrics, including recognition performance, unlinkability, irreversibility, and revocability, and conduct security and privacy analyses. ColorVein achieves competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art methods.