Biometric Template Security Using Watermarking Reinforcement Based Cancellable Transformation

The use of biometric technology in authentication and integrity verification systems necessarily gives rise to issues relating to the security and privacy of transmitted and stored templates. Many techniques have been proposed in the literature involving crypto-biometric algorithm, template transformation method and watermarking reinforcement scheme. Watermarking reinforcement relying on biometrics usually combines the watermarking technique with a feature transformation scheme. We present a new watermarking reinforcement scheme including two security levels to protect biometric data. The first security level is proposed to verify the integrity of the fingerprint while transmitted or stored based on a watermarking approach. To avoid any registration of the stored biometric template, a second security level is developed based on cancellable transformation. The watermarking of the fingerprint image is applied in the wavelet packet decomposition multiresolution domain using a binary watermark derived from the fingerprint minutiae. The developed transformation is designed to explore the relative relation between minutiae in the pair-polar coordinate domain. The transformed minutiae satisfy the non-invertibility recovery of the original ones. Under various scenarios, the suggested scheme is evaluated using the public fingerprint database BioSecure and FVC2002 DB1. The realized testing and derived results show the robustness of the first security level under various attacks and the satisfaction of the second level security to protect biometrics template with an insignificant degradation of the authentication performance.