Hybrid DWT and SVD based biometric watermarking for fingerprint authentication

Abstract: Biometric predicated authentication system has inherently advantage over traditional personal identification techniques. A critical problem is to ascertain the security and integrity of biometric data. Digital watermarking is a technique that is utilized to solve this problem. This paper represents a hybrid DWT and SVD based biometric watermarking algorithm which is utilizable for embedding watermark i.e. binary equivalent of minutiae of fingerprint into cover fingerprint image. Here we select lower resolution band for embedding watermark as watermark detection is computationally efficient at lower resolution band. The proposed algorithm can satisfy the transparency and robustness of the watermarking system very well and even in the presence of different image processing attacks utilizable information can be extracted accurately from fingerprint images.

Keywords: Digital watermarking, DWT, SVD, Arnold transform, Copyright protection.