Authentication systems that employ biometrics are commonplace, as they offer a convenient means of authenticating an individual’s identity. However, these systems give rise to concerns about security and privacy due to insecure template management. As a remedy, biometric template protection (BTP) has been developed. Cancelable biometrics is a non-invertible form of BTP in which the templates are changeable. This paper proposes a deep-learning-based end-to-end multimodal cancelable biometrics scheme called cancelable SoftmaxOut fusion network (CSMoFN). By end-to-end, we mean a model that receives raw biometric data as input and produces a protected template as output. CSMoFN combines two biometric traits, the face and the periocular region, and is composed of three modules: a feature extraction and fusion module, a permutation SoftmaxOut transformation module, and a multiplication-diagonal compression module. The first module carries out feature extraction and fusion, while the second and third are responsible for the hashing of fused features and compression. In addition, our network is equipped with dual template-changeability mechanisms with user-specific seeded permutation and binary random projection. CSMoFN is trained by minimizing the ArcFace loss and the pairwise angular loss. We evaluate the network, using six face–periocular multimodal datasets, in terms of its verification performance, unlinkability, revocability, and non-invertibility.

Periocular biometric covering the immediate vicinity of human eye is a synergistic alternative to face particularly when the face is masked or occluded. Most present work for periocular recognition in the wild are mainly convolutional neural networks learned based on cross-entropy loss. However, periocular images only capture the least salient face features, and thus suffering from severe intra-class compactness and inter-class dispersion issues for discriminative deep feature learning. Recently, label smoothing regularization (LSR) is discerned capable of diminishing the intra-class variation by minimizing the Kullback-Liebler divergence of a uniform distribution and a network prediction distribution. In this paper, we extend LSR to that of Generalized LSR (GLSR) by learning a pre-task network prediction, in place of the predefined uniform distribution. Extensive experiments on four periocular in the wild datasets disclose that the GSLR-trained networks prevail over the LSR-based counterpart and other most recent the state of the arts. This is supported by our empirical analyses that the embedding periocular features rendered by GLSR results in better class-wise cluster separation than the conventional LSR.