Using SVD and DWT Based Steganography to Enhance the Security of Watermarked Fingerprint Images

Watermarking is the process of embedding information into a carrier file for the protection of ownership/copyright of digital media, whilst steganography is the art of hiding information. This paper presents, a hybrid steganographic watermarking algorithm based on Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) transforms in order to enhance the security of digital fingerprint images. A facial watermark is embedded into fingerprint image using a method of singular value replacement. First, the DWT is used to decompose the fingerprint image from the spatial domain to the frequency domain and then the facial watermark is embedded in singular values (SV’s) obtained by application of SVD. In addition, the original fingerprint image is not required to extract the watermark. Experimental results provided demonstrate the methods robustness to image degradation and common signal processing attacks, such as histogram and filtering, noise addition, JPEG and JPEG2000 compression with various levels of quality

Contextual biometric watermarking of fingerprint images

This research presents contextual digital watermarking techniques using face and demographic text data as multiple watermarks for protecting the evidentiary integrity of fingerprint image. The proposed techniques embed the watermarks into selected regions of fingerprint image in MDCT and DWT domains. A general image watermarking algorithm is developed to investigate the application of MDCT in the elimination of blocking artifacts. The application of MDCT has improved the performance of the watermarking technique compared to DCT. Experimental results show that modifications to fingerprint image are visually imperceptible and maintain the minutiae detail. The integrity of the fingerprint image is verified through high matching score obtained from the AFIS system. There is also a high degree of correlation between the embedded and extracted watermarks. The degree of similarity is computed using pixel-based metrics and human visual system metrics. It is useful for personal identification and establishing digital chain of custody. The results also show that the proposed watermarking technique is resilient to common image modifications that occur during electronic fingerprint transmission

Protecting biometric templates with image watermarking techniques

Biometric templates are subject to modifications for identity fraud especially when they are stored in databases. In this paper, a new approach to protecting biometric templates with image watermarking techniques is proposed. The novelty of this approach is that we have combined lattice and block-wise image watermarking techniques to maintain image quality along with cryptographic techniques to embed fingerprint templates into facial images and vice-versa. Thus, protecting them from being modified