System to reduce data retention

An image of at least a portion of a user during enrollment to a biometric identification system is acquired and processed with a first model to determine a first embedding that is representative of features in that image in a first embedding space. The first embedding may be stored for later comparison to identify the user, while the image is not stored. A second model that uses a second embedding space may be later developed. A transformer is trained to accept as input an embedding from the first model and produce as output an embedding consistent with the second embedding space. The previously stored first embedding may be converted to a second embedding in a second embedding space using the transformer. As a result, new embedding models may be implemented without requiring storage of user images for later reprocessing with the new models or requiring re-enrollment by users.