Region-Based Watermarking of Biometric Images: Case Study in Fingerprint Images

Abstract

In this paper, a novel scheme to watermark biometric images is proposed. It exploits the fact that biometric images, normally, have one region of interest, which represents the relevant part of information processable by most of the biometric-based identification/authentication systems. This proposed scheme consists of embedding the watermark into the region of interest only; thus, preserving the hidden data from the segmentation process that removes the useless background and keeps the region of interest unaltered; a process which can be used by an attacker as a cropping attack. Also, it provides more robustness and better imperceptibility of the embedded watermark. The proposed scheme is introduced into the optimum watermark detection in order to improve its performance. It is applied to fingerprint images, one of the most widely used and studied biometric data. The watermarking is assessed in two well-known transform domains: the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and the discrete Fourier transform (DFT). The results obtained are very attractive and clearly show significant improvements when compared to the standard technique, which operates on the whole image. The results also reveal that the segmentation (cropping) attack does not affect the performance of the proposed technique, which also shows more robustness against other common attacks.

Transform Domain Fingerprint Identification Based on DTCWT

“…Zebbiche and F. Khelifi [12] presented biometric images as one Region of Interest (ROI) that has the data processed by most biometric based system. The scheme consists of embedding the watermark into ROI in fingerprint images.…”

Attack against Robust Watermarking-Based Multimodal Biometric Recognition Systems

“…2. Recent work by Zebbiche et al [23] proposes a watermarking scheme for fingerprint images where WM data is embedded into the ridge area (region of interest) only. This scheme can be applied to iris imagery by selectively watermarking the iris texture areas.…”

Experimental study on the impact of robust watermarking on iris recognition accuracy

“…close to minutiae data) or by maintaining the ridge gradient orientations. Recent work by Zebbiche et al [26,27] proposes two robust WM schemes for fingerprint images where WM data is embedded into the ridge area (region of interest RoI) only. The aim is to increase robustness of WM due to the concentration onto the RoI.…”