A biometric-based authentication method, an apparatus, and a system are described. The method includes: receiving a biometric image to be authenticated sent from a client; performing feature extraction to the biometric image to be authenticated to obtain a biometric template to be authenticated; comparing the biometric template to be authenticated with a locally-stored biometric template; and returning an authentication result. In this case, the feature extraction process may be implemented at a cloud server side, as such, the complexity of the client may be reduced, the expandability of the client may be increased, a limitation that the biometric recognition may only be implemented on the client may be eliminated, and diversified utilization may be supported.