This invention relates to methods and devices for verifying the identity of a person based on a sequence of feature components extracted from a biometric sample. Thereafter, the feature components are quantized and assigned a data bit sequence in such a way that adjacent quantization intervals have a Hamming distance of 1. The data bit sequences are concatenated into a bit string, and said bit string is combined with a helper data set by using an exclusive disjunction (XOR) operation into a codeword. Finally, the codeword is decoded into a secret V and a secret S is matched with the secret V.
