A multimodal biometric watermarking system for digital images in redundant discrete wavelet transform

The traditional watermarking algorithms prove the rightful ownership via embedding of independent watermarks like copyright logos, random noise sequences, text etc into the cover images. Coupling biometrics with watermarking evolved as new and secure approach as it embeds user specific biometric traits and thus, narrows down the vulnerability to impostor attacks. A multimodal biometric watermarking system has been proposed in this paper in the redundant discrete wavelet transform(RDWT). Two biometric traits of the user i.e. the iris and facial features are embedded independently into the sub-bands of the RDWT of cover image taking advantage of its translation invariant property and sufficient embedding capacity. The ownership verification accuracy of the proposed system is tested based on the individual biometric traits as well as the fused trait. The accuracy was enhanced while using the fused score for evaluation. The security of the scheme is strengthened with usage of non-linear chaotic maps, randomization via Hessenberg decomposition, Arnold scrambling and multiple secret keys. The robustness of the scheme has been tested against various attacks and the verification accuracy evaluated based on false acceptance rate, false rejection rate, area under curve and equal error rate to validate the efficacy of the proposed scheme.