| Abstract: | ABSTRACT Watermarking techniques are used in biometric systems for the purpose of protecting and authenticating biometric data. This paper presents an efficient scheme to protect and authenticate fingerprint images by watermarking with their corresponding facial images in the wavelet domain using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). The key idea is to use PSO to find the best discrete wavelet transform (DWT) coefficients where the facial image data can be embedded. The objective function for PSO is based on the fingerprint image quality with respect to the Structural Similarity index (SSIM) and Orientation Certainty Level index (OCL). As a result, embedding the facial image data in the selected coefficients generated by the proposed method not only results in minimum distortion of the host image but also retains the feature set of the original fingerprint to be used in fingerprint recognition. The robustness of the watermark extracted using the proposed technique has been tested against various image processing attacks. This concept of watermarking a biometric image with another biometric image finds application in multimodal biometric authentication for a more secure system of personal recognition at the receiver's end. |
