Template protection is an essential requirement in biometric based authentication systems due to security and privacy issues. These issues have been arisen because of unsafe storage and misuse of templates. Techniques for template protection are developed so that templates stored in databases remain safe and inaccessible to unauthorized users. Security and privacy are the major factors to be achieved through these techniques. This paper presents a watermarking based approach to protect templates in multimodal biometric systems. Here, iris and face biometric traits have been used. This approach has used watermarking technique to embed iris image into face image to allow their safe storage in database. At the time of authentication, both iris and face patterns are retrieved from the watermarked image and matching is performed with query images. The final decision is given by matching score obtained after fusion of iris and face matching scores at match score level. MATLAB has been used to implement the proposed approach and the observation from results confirms that it does not degrade the recognition performance of existing multimodal biometric system. Rather, it provides protection to templates and facilitates to reject the compromised templates by extending the decomposition to higher level or simply by changing the embedding and extraction algorithms.
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