Fragile watermarking framework for tamper detection of color biometric images

Abstract

Application of fragile watermarking on biometric images stored at a server or cloud ensures proper authentication and tamper detection when access to the servers was shared. In this paper, a hybrid domain fragile watermarking technique for authenticity of color biometric images, using hybridization of various transforms such as discrete cosine transform (DCT), fast discrete curvelet transform (FDCuT), and singular value decomposition (SVD) is proposed. The hybrid transform coefficients are modified according to the scrambled color watermark to obtain watermarked color biometric image. The security of this technique is strengthened with the usage of Arnold scrambling, and by using multiple secret keys. The proposed technique is analyzed on FEI Brazilian face database. The experimental results show that this technique performs better than the existing fragile watermarking techniques.