Fusion of LSB and DWT biometric watermarking using offline handwritten signature for copyright protection

Abstract

Biometric watermarking was introduced as the synergistic integration of biometrics and digital watermarking technology. This paper proposes a novel biometric watermarking technique, which embeds offline handwritten signature in host image for copyright protection. We propose to combine the conventional LSB-based and DWT-based watermarking techniques into a unison framework, which is known as LSB-DWT in this paper. The proposed LSB-DWT technique is evaluated against various simulated security attacks, i.e. JPEG compression, Gaussian low-pass filtering, median filtering, Gaussian noise, scaling, rotation and cropping. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed LSB- DWT technique exhibits remarkable watermark imperceptibility and watermark robustness. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.