Data Hiding in Iris Image for Privacy Protection

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel iris image data hiding scheme for privacy protection. Privacy personal data is embedded into the iris image such that its impact on the iris recognition is minimised. This is achieved by restricting the modifications of the embedding within the regions that seldom affects the iris recognition with the help of the STC (syndrome trellis coding) framework. We also propose a novel distortion function to measure the impact of the data embedding on iris recognition, where the regions with important iris features are assigned with high embedding cost. Experimental results show that, by using our proposed scheme, we can embed sufficient data into the iris image with high recognition accuracy maintained.