Securing multimodal biometric data through watermarking and steganography

Many security concerns are raised through the storing and transferring of biometric data, which is sensitive and may be impossible to recover if lost, counterfeited, or hacked. Here, we present an approach for hiding biometric data, which utilizes a combination of asymmetric digital watermarking and steganography. The combination of these techniques enables the system to handle many issues associated with storing and transferring raw biometric data. What we propose is a multilayer framework that first, encodes eigen-features extracted from raw face images, into a fingerprint image. Sequentially, each watermarked fingerprint image is encoded within an arbitrary host image unrelated to biometrics or forensics, securing the image for transfer. The contributions of this work are as follows: developed an application of biometric watermarking face eigenfeatures into fingerprint images that are usable to provide authentication; developed the process of encoding the fingerprint images into an arbitrary host image, which provides an increased level of security and authentication; and the introduction of the concept of an asymmetric watermarking and steganography framework.