1 research outputs found
Region-Based Watermarking of Biometric Images: Case Study in Fingerprint Images
In this paper, a novel scheme to watermark biometric
images is proposed. It exploits the fact that biometric
images, normally, have one region of interest, which represents
the relevant part of information processable by most of the
biometric-based identification/authentication systems. This proposed
scheme consists of embedding the watermark into the
region of interest only; thus, preserving the hidden data from
the segmentation process that removes the useless background
and keeps the region of interest unaltered; a process which can
be used by an attacker as a cropping attack. Also, it provides
more robustness and better imperceptibility of the embedded
watermark. The proposed scheme is introduced into the optimum
watermark detection in order to improve its performance. It is
applied to fingerprint images, one of the most widely used and
studied biometric data. The watermarking is assessed in two
well-known transform domains: the discrete wavelet transform
(DWT) and the discrete Fourier transform (DFT). The results
obtained are very attractive and clearly show significant improvements
when compared to the standard technique, which
operates on the whole image. The results also reveal that the
segmentation (cropping) attack does not affect the performance
of the proposed technique, which also shows more robustness
against other common attacks