Verification watermarks on fingerprint recognition and retrieval

Abstract

Current "invisible" watermarking techniques aim at producing watermarked data that suffer no or little quality degradation and are perceptually identical to the original versions. The most common utility of a watermarked image is (1) for image viewing and display, and (2) for extracting the embedded watermark in subsequent copy protection applications. The issue is often centered on the robustness of the watermark for detection and extraction. In addition to robustness studies, a fundamental question will center on the utilization value of the watermarked images beyond perceptual quality evaluation. Essentially we have to study how the watermarks inserted affect the subsequent processing and utility of images, and what watermarking schemes we can develop that will cater to these processing tasks. This work focuses on the study of watermarking on images used in automatic personal identification technology based on fingerprints. We investigate the effects of watermarking fingerprint images on the recognition and retrieval accuracy using a proposed invisible fragile watermarking technique for image verification applications on a specific fingerprint recognition system. We shall also describe the watermarking scheme, fingerprint recognition and feature extraction techniques used. We believe that watermarking of images will provide value-added protection, as well as copyright notification capability, to the fingerprint data collection processes and subsequent usage. © 2000 SPIE and IS&T.