Fingerprint watermarking using svd and dwt based steganography to enhance security

摘要

Identification of persons by way of biometric features has evolved significantly over theudyears. During this time, biometric recognition has received much attention due to its needudfor security. Amongst the many existing biometrics, fingerprints are considered to be oneudof the most practical ones. Techniques such as watermarking and steganography haveudbeen used in attempt to improve security of biometric data.udWatermarking is the process of embedding information into a carrier file for the protectionudof ownership/copyright of music, video or image files, whilst steganography is the art ofudhiding information.udThis paper presents, a hybrid steganographic watermarking algorithm based on DiscreteudWavelet Transform (DWT) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) transforms in order toudenhance the security of digital fingerprint images. A facial watermark is embedded intoudfingerprint image using a method of singular value replacement. First, the DWT is used touddecompose the fingerprint image from the spatial domain to the frequency domain and thenudthe facial watermark is embedded in singular values (SV’s) obtained by application of SVD.udIn addition, the original fingerprint image is not required to extract the watermark.udExperimental results provided demonstrate the methods robustness to image degradation andudcommon signal processing attacks, such as histogram and filtering, noise addition, JPEG andudJPEG2000 compression with various levels of quality.