Hiding Fingerprint Minutiae in Images

We introduce an application of steganography and watermarking to enable secure biometric data (e.g., fingerprints) exchange. We hide fingerprint minutiae data in a host image, which can be a synthetic fingerprint image, a face image or an arbitrary image. It is this carrier image that is transferred to the receiving party in this exchange, instead of the actual minutiae data. The hidden biometric data are extracted accurately from the carrier image using a secret key. Furthermore, when the host is a face image, the proposed method provides an additional cue in authenticating the user. Data are hidden in the host image in an adaptive way to minimize possible degradations to that image. Our method can also tolerate several attacks on the carrier image.