Secure Remote Fingerprint Verification Using Dual Watermarks

Abstract

As user authentication by using biometric information such as fingerprint has been widely accepted, there has been a growing interest in protecting the biometric information itself against external attackers. In this paper, we propose a dual watermarking technique to protect fingerprint images in transmission/storage. As the proposed dual watermarking technique provides both robustness and fragileness with the embedded watermarks, it can guarantee the integrity of the fingerprint image transmitted and/or stored. In particular, when the embedding locations for fragile watermarks are selected, we consider the ridge information of the fingerprint images to avoid possible interference between the robust watermark detection and fingerprint verification systems. Based on experimental results, we confirm that our dual watermarking technique can detect the robust watermark accurately and avoid any significant degradation in the accuracy of fingerprint verification.