Embedding Data in Non-Important Gabor Ridges

Abstract

Hiding information either by steganography or watermarking operation is essential for computer science. It is used as a method for sending secure and important information. It has special features that even if this information is discovered, the third part cannot reconstruct the original information in any way, not famously and commonly nor difficultly and especially by using any technique or algorithm. There are many hiding techniques; each one of them used different paths to ensure standard properties such as optimizing security level, increasing the amount of embedding data, decreasing the ability to reconstruct hidden information by any unwanted part. Here in the following suggested technique, different quantities of bits are hidden in various pixels depending on some discovered constraints by using the famous Gabor filter then divided ridges part in a selected fingerprint image for the purpose of hiding relevant information into important and non-important pixels that laying out of ridges in final images after applying Gabor filter which consider not important regions in fingerprint image for discovering important features from the image. The pixels used in hiding information belong to finger ridges in pure fingerprint images but covert to white pixels (valley) in the matrix after applying the Gabor filter and in original white pixels in both matrices by using different techniques for each type of pixels. The imaging stage constructed after the suggested technique is good and identical to the pure image for the accepted degree as shown in used fidelity metrics (PSNR). It is similar to a pure fingerprint matrix as proved in these metrics for calculating the level of goodness of proposed algorithms. Our algorithm exploits existing pixels in fingerprint image with different levels of importance and avoids pixels with high importance for protected important features from non-deterministic varying.