An Efficient and Robust Zero-Bit Watermarking Technique for Biometric Image Protection

Protection of data is becoming a crucial task in digital world. This paper proposes a concept for securing biometric data using zero watermarking. Biometric data like a fingerprint, iris, etc. in which unique characters reside, but it may lead to an undesired situation if an attacker tries to copy it from a distributed database. The paper introduces a zero-bit watermarking scheme in iris image. Unlike in conventional watermarking, the watermarked image gets tempered due to distortion of pixels of an image. This paper proposes a robust zero-bit watermarking scheme in which a digital pattern is generated using a unique features from the iris image without tampering the host image. This method uses SVD and DWT for performing zero-bit watermarking and making it stable against several image processing attacks. The features of iris are unique, so the developed algorithm prevents data from duplicity or piracy issues.