Short Paper—A Novel Approach for an Interoperable Biometric Verification

A Novel Approach for an Interoperable

Biometric Verification
https://doi.org/10.3991/ijim.v12i6.9528

Mohamed El Beqqal(*), Mostafa Azizi, Jean Louis Lanet

University Mohamed First Oujda, Oujda, Morocco
[email protected]

Abstract—Increasingly, safety is present in everyday life, at work, at home,

in recreational environments, and in all places where there is a flow of people
who share a common space. Using biometric fingerprint technique for identity
verification has become a primordial due to the Reduced costs of implementa-
tion, maturity of this technology in the market and the ease of use. Many im-
plementations exist using this technique , however, these systems are hard cou-
pled with the environment in which they were developed and the hardware used
to capture biometric data. Consequently, the interoperability issue is hard pre-
sent in case of changing the environment or using new fingerprint reader. In this
paper, we propose a new architecture to solve this problem by dividing the main
biometric application to layers based on a flexible communication between com-
ponents and supporting heterogeneous platforms and biometric readers.

Keywords—Fingerprint, Authentication, SDK, Interoperability, Biometrics.

1 Introduction

The fingerprint solutions represent the large part of the market for biometric pro-
cesses. It is clearly the preferred solution for companies working in this field. The
strength of this process is that the use of the fingerprint is generally easier to accept by
the community and is one of the most effective and least expensive [1].
In spite of the large advantages offered by this biometric technique, many challenges
remain an object of interest and field of study for researchers and companies such as
the privacy aspect, the optimization of image enhancement algorithms and matching
techniques. The technical solutions proposed by the companies including hardware and
software allowing biometric recognition are largely diversified which result the existing
of several biometric implementations that are strongly coupled to the architecture pro-
posed by the supplier. Hence our proposal solves this interoperability problem.
The paper is structured as follows: Section 2, we present the basic information con-
cerning the biometric fingerprint from classification to most used characteristic points.
After this, we give an overview of the prominent issues in this field and we present the
state of art of some academic biometric fingerprint implementations in which we dis-
cuss the issues existing in these systems. In section 5, we present the proposed archi-
tecture of our implementation. More precisely, we explain the role and communication

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Short Paper—A Novel Approach for an Interoperable Biometric Verification

between each component’s layer. In section 6, we discuss the obtained results. Finally,
we conclude the paper with a conclusion and future works.

2 Basics on biometric fingerprint

A fingerprint is a drawing formed by the lines of the skin. It is found in different

parts of the body. When we talk about fingerprints, we are referring to the lines of the
skin of the fingers. This last are analyzed by a fingerprint reader to establish a numeric
template.
Several classifications of fingerprint exist in the research field. As mentioned in [2],
among the most used ones, we found the three main categories (Arch, loop and whorl)
as shown in figure 1. Other sub-categories was listed by author in [3] deriving from the
Henry classification which provides five classes of fingerprints .

Fig. 1. Fingerprint main categories

In addition to the singular points (core and delta points) which allow the determina-
tion of type of fingerprint, the characteristic points better known under the name of
minutiae constitute the base of the process of matching between two fingerprints. Both
of this technical information are extracted based on image processing algorithms.
A minutia is a point that is located on the change of continuity of the ridges lines.
Among the most used characteristic points in the matching algorithms, we have the
bifurcation ridges and ending ridges as indicated in [4]. Figure 2 shows the schema of
these two minutiae.
About fifteen of these minutiae are enough to identify someone, but the level of
precision can go up to 100 points according to the security context.

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Short Paper—A Novel Approach for an Interoperable Biometric Verification

Fig. 2. Bifurcation ridge and ending ridge in fingerprint

3 Issues

The authentication using fingerprint technique has widely being used in various ar-
eas and domains including access control, attendance control and criminal investiga-
tion. However, despite of its large benefits, many concerns and challenges still being
attracting more and more researchers aiming to implement a polyvalent identity verifi-
cation system especially the interoperability, performance and security issues.
Interoperability is considered as a crucial issue since many system implementations
for biometric verification and identification exist using several software and SDK re-
quired by the specific scanners available in the market. Performance can also be a key
factor while the number of available records in database is important and the processing
time of identity verification should not exceed a specific lapse of time. RFID technol-
ogy can be an optimal solution for fast identification since the comparison is done by
the ID which ensure unique identity, whereas no security and authenticity are guaran-
teed since the RFID tag can be possessed by another person.

4 Related works

Joseph Kalunga and Simon Tembo [5] have proposed a biometric fingerprint system
for verification and vetting management. In this project, many features were modeled
and implemented such as Criminal Vetting, Fingerprint enrolment,Criminal Investiga-
tion, Identity Verification. All these functionalities are implemented using specific Sys-
tem Development Kit (SDK) for U 4500 fingerprint reader using visual studio 2010 for
implementing the backend verification functions. If we decide to use another reader
which SDK provides only java interface, we will need to design new code for this ap-
plication.
In [6,7], authors present a biometric fingerprint system for access control in univer-
sity context. The verification process of fingerprint is done after a successful enrollment
of student in database. During the authentication step, the collected finger print is
matched with all fingerprint templates stored in database which can be a time consum-
ing operation in case of a large number university database records. Author in [6] an-
swers this need by combining RFID technology with biometric fingerprint to quickly
identify the concerned template based on the appropriate RFID tag.

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Short Paper—A Novel Approach for an Interoperable Biometric Verification

In [8], the classroom attendance system designed and developed by author aims to
bring the portability aspect by using Arduino as a local processing unit which interacts
with a mobile fingerprint reader. The student's data is stored in a memory card as en-
crypted templates. Furthermore, the author used the ZFM20 fingerprint scanner for fin-
ger identification to reduce the processing load on Arduino main processor. Besides the
ZFM20 scanner will be also used for storing template in ImageBuffer area available in
RAM space module as explained in [9]. However, no encryption or protection of the
collected fingerprint was assured, since users can read and write in the buffer dedicated
for storage using instructions. The storage of fingerprint's template in ZFM20 Im-
ageBuffer and SD card in different format can cause a serious problem of redundancy
and synchronization between the two.

5 Proposed system

In this section, we present the prominent ideas behind our system implementation

Fig. 3. Architecture of the proposed system

As shown in the figure above, the system is composed of 3 parts:

• Fingerprint Application (FA) and the global Finger Application System (GFAS)
• Database interaction
• Communication with fingerprint readers

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5.1 FA and GFAS

The Fingerprint Application (FA) stands for the front-end and back-end parts devel-
oped by the user to manage a full authentication and enrollment based on biometric
data collected from the readers.
The Global Finger Application System (GFAS) represents the main features used in
a biometric fingerprint system. These features were collected based on many exiting
implementations of fingerprint verification system. Among the most common actions
we have:
FP capture: This action consists of scanning the live finger to get a digital image in
a specific format depending of the scanner supported image extension. We noticed that
the BMP format is widely used in several SDKs specifications.
FP pre-processing: Many image processing steps can be done to the captured finger
from normalization, thinning to binarization. These three transformations are primor-
dial for each initial finger image. However other steps could be performed to produce
a best image quality.
Minutiae extraction: At end of this step, a template is produced containing the in-
formation about characteristic point. Each of the representation in minutiae template is
covered by various standards such as ANSI-NIST and ISO/IEC 19794-2 which ensures
the interoperability of the different recognition algorithms as mentioned in [10].
FP enrollment: The Fingerprint enrollment step in which the template obtained from
minutiae extraction is encrypted and saved in central database. The quality of this cap-
tured fingerprint is considered as critical since all the upcoming verifications will be
done based on this model. This point justifies the fact that most of the finger biometrics
systems are based on three attempts capturing finger to recover the most accurate im-
age.
FP identification: TheFingerprint identification consists of comparing the captured
Fingerprint template with all instances exiting database until we obtain a satisfying-
matching score.
FP verification: The verification step is special case of identification when the
matching is done between the live Fingerprint template and a specific template in data-
base that have already been identified.

5.2 Database interaction

As shown in figure 3, our storage model consists on the central database which is
directly called only during the enrollment process. In this step, the database is less so-
licited since the registration will consist on inserting a new record in the appropriate
database table. However, the time dimension can be crucial during the authentication
process mostly if the database contains thousands of biometric records.
For this purpose, we propose in our system to use database views which are created
depending on the fingerprint classification considered. More precisely, we use materi-
alized views to store physically the biometric records as presented in [11]. The number
of views depends on the chosen classification. For example, we have created three ma-
terialized views which will reduce the matching time during the identification process.

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Short Paper—A Novel Approach for an Interoperable Biometric Verification

Here, if the person has a loop fingerprint, the process of searching and matching will
consider only a specific part of database. Furthermore, the database is kept hidden and
not exposed during the verification of fingerprints since we customize materialized
views to be accessible only for reading.

5.3 Communication with fingerprint readers

In this section, we will present the communication between the three layers:

Fig. 4. Communication between BA and FP readers

As shown in figure 4, when the Fingerprint Application (FA) triggers an action

which is already specified in the Global Finger Application System (GFAS), this action
is expressed in form of high level message able to be treated only by the FA methods
and independent of the type of the SDK used to execute this action. For this purpose
the FA will call an intermediate layer FPEM using web services. This layer consists of
application which take as input some parameters as action to be executed, reader to use
and other optional attributes. The data concerning each reader is specified in an XML
file. This last contains rooting and information to communicate with the SDK layer.
For example, the configuration file will contain the port number, IP address and the
web service to call depending on action coming from FA layer. Once the information
is gathered, the FPEM main application will dispatch calls to SDK layer.
As indicated in figure 4, for each reader we have the main SDK components that
consist of technical objects allowing the physical communication with the reader. Some
companies offers DLL (Dynamic Link Library) libraries based on Windows execution,
others offer JAR (Java Archive) files requiring JVM(Java Virtual Machine) environ-
ment and others systems can be supported by the SDK. To answer to this

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Short Paper—A Novel Approach for an Interoperable Biometric Verification

interoperability problem, for each reader used in our system, a Specific Fingerprint Ap-
plication (SFAi) will be developed. The main goal of SFAi is to capture the web service
request from FPEM application and convert the incoming message to specific message
supported by the SDK which will be used in its turn by the methods offered by the SDK
library.

6 Results and Discussion

The system implementation presented above provides many advantages from flexi-
bility, performance, scalability and interoperability:

Fig. 5. Fingerprint processing steps

The flexibility aspect is shown on the possibility to use relevant actions of the reader
to make profit of the optimized methods and algorithms of fingerprint processing and
communication with the reader. However, the more we make use of the reader SDK
features, the more we will be coupled to this last as shown in the figure 5. For example,
in our implementation, we forecast the use of the reader for scanning the fingerprint
and image pre-processing to get a binary image, since the classification is not supported
by all fingerprint readers and the minutiae extraction provides several templates format
that are not common for all readers. Besides, with this implementation, we ensure a
performance coming from the reduced number of matching operations due to the use
of materialized views resulting from the fingerprint classification used for storage.
The scalability aspect is ensured with the ease of adding a new fingerprint device to
the system. This step consists in adding a new record in the configuration XML file in
the FPEM layer. In addition, a SFAi should be developed to convert the incoming re-
quests to a comprehensible actions for the SDK. Using this mechanism allows to make
use of several readers supporting heterogeneous languages such as java, c# and others
in an interoperable biometric system.

7 Conclusion

In a situation where institutions aim to use different biometric fingerprint readers for
identity verification, each scanner requires its own application design and development.
In order to answer this need and unify system functional authentication process, we
have proposed a new architecture based on intermediate middleware layer which will
abstract the main biometric authentication solution from the technical hardware

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Short Paper—A Novel Approach for an Interoperable Biometric Verification

specifications. Furthermore, the proposed system is designed to be adaptable for adding

biometrics readers in the system. In addition, we have optimized the database model
design and interaction during the biometrics matching process. As a future work, we
aim to continue on the implementation of our system architecture and validate our so-
lution by real test cases.

8 Acknowledgement

This research is performed inside the MATSI Lab., ESTO, University Mohammed
First, Oujda (Morocco).

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10 Authors

Mohamed EL BEQQAL graduated from ENSAO (National Higher School for Ap-
plied Science, Oujda) with a degree of state engineer Software Quality in 2011. He is
currently a Ph.D. candidate at MATSI-Laboratory/ Mohammed First University of
Oujda, B.P. 524, 60000, Oujda, Morocco under the supervision of Pr. Mostafa AZIZI. His
research focus on: RFID, Biometrics, Internet of things, Access control, identification,
authentication. (e-mail: [email protected])
Mostafa AZIZI Ph.D., Ing, Professor, MATSI-Laboratory, ESTO, University Med
1st, Oujda, B.P. 524, 60000, Oujda, Morocco. His researches focused on: Verification/
CoVerification, Testing, Computer Security, Software Development, Hardware/Soft-
ware Systems. (e-mail: [email protected])
Jean Louis Lanet Ph.D. He is member of the Tamis research team at INRIA-
Rennes where he manages the LHS. His researches focused on: Security of small sys-
tems like smart cards and software engineering. (e-mail: [email protected])

Article submitted 11 September 2018. Resubmitted 20 October 2018. Final acceptance 21 October 2018.
Final version published as submitted by the authors.

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