Abstract: Fingerprint is the most appreciated biometric identification system in the world today. The latest technology of the fingerprint identification has made the identification and verification of the human beings easy. But the database of the fingerprint templates is still unprotected except physical security. On the other hand invisible watermarking has enhanced the security in images. My topic is a combined approach for the security and image quality preservation of the fingerprint template images which are stored inside the database for future reference. The templates are watermarked with invisible logo, which is checked before the minutiae extraction process of the verification process. If the invisible watermark is missing or distorted then the template is considered to be a bogus or tampered one and the identification process fails.

Keywords: : Discreet Cosine Transform (DCT), Watermarking, Fingerprint Template, Invisible Watermark, Frequency Distribution, Spatial Domain.