Reversible Data Embedding For Fingerprint Minutiae Templates Authentication

In the digital information era, biometric recognition systems have been widely deployed for identity authentication. Among several biometrics, human fingerprint has became one of the most popular biometrics traits. However, the manipulation of the fingerprint data rises the urgent needs of fingerprint data authentication to protect the digital content and ensure authenticity. In this paper, we propose a protection scheme to provide authenticity as well as integrity for individual fingerprint data. A well known reversible data embedding technique named different expansion (DE) is adopted to allow the exact recovery of the hashed fingerprint data with personal secret for authentication. Depending on the size of the data to be embedded, the proposed scheme is able to maintain low distortion over the source fingerprint data, hence maintaining its visual quality and original data structure.