Robust Minutiae Watermarking in Wavelet Domain for Fingerprint Security

Authors: Rajlaxmi Chouhan, Pritee Khanna

Abstract:

In this manuscript, a wavelet-based blind watermarking scheme has been proposed as a means to provide security to authenticity of a fingerprint. The information used for identification or verification of a fingerprint mainly lies in its minutiae. By robust watermarking of the minutiae in the fingerprint image itself, the useful information can be extracted accurately even if the fingerprint is severely degraded. The minutiae are converted in a binary watermark and embedding these watermarks in the detail regions increases the robustness of watermarking, at little to no additional impact on image quality. It has been experimentally shown that when the minutiae is embedded into wavelet detail coefficients of a fingerprint image in spread spectrum fashion using a pseudorandom sequence, the robustness is observed to have a proportional response while perceptual invisibility has an inversely proportional response to amplification factor “K". The DWT-based technique has been found to be very robust against noises, geometrical distortions filtering and JPEG compression attacks and is also found to give remarkably better performance than DCT-based technique in terms of correlation coefficient and number of erroneous minutiae.

Keywords: Fingerprint watermarking, minutiae, discrete wavelet transform, PN sequence

Digital Object Identifier (DOI): doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1331413

References:

[1] S. Jain, "Digital watermarking techniques: A case study in fingerprints & faces" in Proc. Indian Conference on Computer Vision, Graphics and Image Processing ICVGIP 2000, pp. 139-144, 2000.
[2] D. Mathivadhani, C. Meena, "A Comparative Study on Fingerprint Protection Using Watermarking Techniques," Global Journal of Computer Science and Technology, vol. 9, no. 5, pp. 98-102, 2010.
[3] M. Vatsa, R. Singh, A. Noore, M. H. Houck, K. Morris, "Robust biometric image watermarking for fingerprint and face template protection", IEICE Electronic Express vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 23-28, 2006.
[4] K. Zebbiche, F. Khelifi, "Region-Based Watermarking of Biometric Images: Case Study in Fingerprint Images", International Journal of Digital Multimedia Broadcasting 492942, 2008.
[5] K. Hui, L. Jing, Z. Xiao-dong, Z. Xiao-xu, "Study on Implementation of a Fingerprint Watermark", in Proc. International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering, vol. 3, pp. 725-728, 2008.
[6] V. Potdar, S. Han, E. Chang, "A Survey of Digital Image Watermarking Techniques", in Proc. IEEE International Conference on Industrial Informatics, pp. 709-716, 2005.
[7] H. Fu, "Literature Survey on Digital Image Watermarking", Lectures notes on EE381K Multidimensional Signal Processing, 1998.
[8] C.V. Serdean, M. Tomlinson, J. Wade, A.M. Ambroze, "Protecting Intellectual Rights: Digital Watermarking in the wavelet domain," IEEE Int. Workshop Trends and Recent Achievements in IT, pp. 16-18, 2002.
[9] B. Furht, D. Kirovski, Encryption and Authentications: Techniques and Applications, USA: Auerbach, 2006.
[10] I. J. Cox, J. Kilian, T. Leighton, T.G. Shamoon, "Secure Spread Spectrum Watermarking for Multimedia", in Proc. ICIP-97, USA, vol. 6, pp. 1673- 1687, 1997.
[11] S.D. Lin, Chin-Feng Chen, "A robust DCT-based watermarking for copyright protection", (2000) IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, vol. 46, no. 3, pp. 415 - 421.
[12] J. Delaigle, C. De Vleeschouwer, B. Macq, " Psychovisual Approach to Digital Picture Watermarking", Journal of Electronic Imaging, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 628-640, 1998.
[13] A. Graphs, "An Introduction to Wavelets," IEEE Computational Science and Engineering, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 50-61, 1995.
[14] R.C. Gonzalez, R.E. Woods, Digital Image Processing. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, 2002.
[15] A. Abu-Errub, A. Al-Haj, "Optimized DWT Based Image Watermarking," (2008) Proc. IEEE First International Conference on Applications of Digital Information and Web Technologies, pp. 1-6.
[16] A. Al-Haj, "Combined DWT-DCT Digital Image Watermarking", (2007) Journal of Computer Science, vol. 3, no. 9, pp. 740-746.
[17] R. Safabakhsh, S. Zaboli, A. Tabibiazar, "Digital Watermarking on Still Images Using Wavelet Transform," in Proc. International Conference on Information Technology: Coding and Computing ITCC-04, IEEE, 2004.
[18] R. Chouhan, A. Mishra, P. Khanna, "Wavelet-based robust digital watermarking scheme for fingerprint authentication", Proc. International Conference on Intelligent Computational Systems, pp. 29- 33, 2011.
[19] F. Zhao, X. Tang, "Preprocessing and postprocessing for skeleton-based fingerprint minutiae extraction," Pattern Recognition, vol. 40, pp. 1270 - 1281, 2007.
[20] M. Kaur, M. Singh, A. Girdhar, P.S. Sandhu, "Fingerprint verification system using Minutiae extraction technique", World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology, vol. 46, pp. 2008.
[21] S. Bernard, N. Boujema, D. Vitale, C. Bricot, "Fingerprint Segmentation using the Phase of Multiscale Gabor Wavelets", in Proc. 5th Asian Conference on Computer Vision, Melbourne, Australia, January 2002.
[22] S.A. Sudiro, M. Paindavoine, T.M. Kusuma, "Simple Fingerprint Minutiae Extraction Algorithm Using Crossing Number On Valley Structure," in Proc. IEEE Workshop on Automatic Identification Advanced Technologies -07, pp. 41 - 44, 2007.
[23] F.A.P. Petitcolas, "Watermarking Schemes Evaluation", IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, vol. 17, pp. 58-64, 2000.
[24] D. Maltoni, D. Maio, A. K. Jain, S. Prabhakar, Handbook of Fingerprint Recognition. Second ed., London: Springer, 2009, DB1_B set from FVC2000 and FVC2002 databases.