Reversible Watermarking scheme for Authentication and integrity control in Biometric Images

Abstract

In this era of digital world, authentication and integrity of biometric data is really imperative for data communication over erroneous network as well as for storage and processing in large database. In order to attain aforesaid, a watermark comprising details of ownership can be embedded in the biometric image. Further, it is required that the modified data can be reversed back to original data without any information loss, after the details are retrieved. This paper proposes a completely reversible watermarking system preventing any loss of information and solving the issues associated with biometric authentication and integrity. The proposed technique utilizes Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) for compact features extraction. Based upon the features extracted from the original image and watermark, a secure key is generated. This key is required to retrieve the watermark from the modified image. Experimental outcomes reveal that proposed methodology gives high values of Peak Signal to Noise Ratio and Normalized Correlation which are comparable with the state-of-art work.