title: Enhancing security of fingerprints through contextual biometric watermarking.
abstract: This paper presents a novel digital watermarking technique using face and demographic text data as multiple watermarks for verifying the chain of custody and protecting the integrity of a fingerprint image. The watermarks are embedded in selected texture regions of a fingerprint image using discrete wavelet transform. Experimental results show that modifications in these locations are visually imperceptible and maintain the minutiae details. The integrity of the fingerprint image is verified through the high matching scores obtained from an automatic fingerprint identification system. There is also a high degree of visual correlation between the embedded images, and the extracted images from the watermarked fingerprint. The degree of similarity is computed using pixel-based metrics and human visual system metrics. The results also show that the proposed watermarked fingerprint and the extracted images are resilient to common attacks such as compression, filtering, and noise.
authors.affiliation: Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26506, USA. noore@csee.wvu.edu
authors.forename: Afzel
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Noore
authors.forename: Richa
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Singh
authors.forename: Mayank
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Vatsa
authors.forename: Max M
authors.initials: MM
authors.lastname: Houck
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D016494:Computer Security; D003878:Dermatoglyphics; D005145:Face / Q000033:anatomy & histology; D006801:Humans; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated