Watermarking for protected fingerprint authentication

This paper presents a spatial biometric watermarking scheme for multimodal authentication system. This method embeds the face features (watermark) into the fingerprint image (cover) via a generated secret key to locate the pixels to be watermarked while preserving the fingerprint minutia points. The face features are extracted using Orthogonal Locality Preserving Projections technique. The proposed scheme has the advantage that in addition to fingerprint matching, the recovered watermark during the decoding can be used to establish the authenticity of the fingerprint and the user. The experimental results obtained using the ORL face database and FVC2002 DB2 fingerprint database have showed that the fingerprint-face based multimodal authentication system has good performance accuracy.