| dc.description.abstract | Identification of persons by way of biometric features has evolved significantly over the
years. During this time, biometric recognition has received much attention due to its need
for security. Amongst the many existing biometrics, fingerprints are considered to be one
of the most practical ones. Techniques such as watermarking and steganography have
been used in attempt to improve security of biometric data.
Watermarking is the process of embedding information into a carrier file for the protection
of ownership/copyright of music, video or image files, whilst steganography is the art of
hiding information.
This paper presents, a hybrid steganographic watermarking algorithm based on Discrete
Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) transforms in order to
enhance the security of digital fingerprint images. A facial watermark is embedded into
fingerprint image using a method of singular value replacement. First, the DWT is used to
decompose the fingerprint image from the spatial domain to the frequency domain and then
the facial watermark is embedded in singular values (SV’s) obtained by application of SVD.
In addition, the original fingerprint image is not required to extract the watermark.
Experimental results provided demonstrate the methods robustness to image degradation and
common signal processing attacks, such as histogram and filtering, noise addition, JPEG and
JPEG2000 compression with various levels of quality. | en |
