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Enhancing security of fingerprints through contextual biometric watermarking

NCJ Number
305864
Journal
Forensic Science International Volume: 169 Issue: 2-3 Dated: 2007 Pages: 188-194
Author(s)
Afzel Noore ; Richa Singha ; Mayank Vatsaa ; Max M. Houck
Date Published
July 2007
Length
7 pages
Annotation

This paper presents a novel digital watermarking technique that uses face and demographic text data as multiple watermarks for verifying the chain of custody and protecting the integrity of a fingerprint image.

Abstract

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. (Published Abstract Provided)