Applying Information Hiding into Fingerprint Verification System using Fragile Watermarking Technique

Abstract — Protection of biometric data & templates is gaining interest and crucial issue for the security of biometric systems. Digital media in these recent days has led to an increase of digital piracy and tampering especially for biometric identification system. Digital watermarking techniques are used to authenticate a source that has been subjected to potential tempering attacks. These attacks are intended to either circumvent the security afforded by the system or to deter the normal functioning of the system. Thus a protective scheme is needed which will preserve fidelity and prevent alterations. This research work had proposed an architectural framework that will apply information hiding method into biometric identification system. A Fragile image watermarking technique has been used to hide additional information into fingerprint images by changing the least significant bit value of a random chosen pixel of the image. The embedded information can be extracted without referencing to the original image. This proposed framework is to be applied in the real environment to authenticate the digital images in the database of fingerprint biometric system so that they can secured from any unwanted attacks such as intention to fraud fingerprint template. The results show that the fingerprint images are not being affected when the watermarking method is implemented and the performance of the fingerprint authentication system is also not affected when the watermarked fingerprint images are used in the system. This study can be use for image authentication especially to detect whether the image has been tampered by image processing such as noise addition and blurrin