<p>Biometrics associated with automated methods of identifying a person or verifying the identity of a person based on physiological or behavioral characteristics. Commonly used biometric features are facial features, fingerprints, voice, facial thermo grams, iris, posture/gait, palm print, hand geometry etc. Compared with other biometric characteristics iris is the most stable and hence the most reliable biometric characteristic over the period of a lifetime. This proposed work provides comparative study of various filters of Wavelet Transforms in terms of size and PSNR of images<em>.</em></p>

Protection of biometric data is gaining importance because its uniqueness and digital watermarking techniques are used to protect the biometric data from either accidental or intentional attacks. Here introduces a novel secured authentication method using wavelet decomposition and Visual Cryptography to hide an iris image.In this report gives exhaustive study on a scheme in which iris image is secured by using a technique called Visual Cryptography (VC). In this technique, iris image is embedded in cover image and then using wavelet transform this output image is decomposed into four shares. These four shares are compressed at sender site. At receiver side, to obtain original iris image inverse DWT is obtained and finally bit matching procedure has been applied. The result shows that Stegnography and Visual cryptography implementation on biometrics, secures Iris and related textual information from getting identity forged. In comparison with existing approach quality of final watermarked cover images and Iris has been maintained which could be used for matching of it for authentication. Along with quality, goal of higher security and bandwidth reduction by reducing size of shares is achieved. Also technique of three least significant bits applied successfully that allows secret message of increased length by maintaining quality of Iris.