A novel image encryption scheme using an irrevocable multimodal biometric key

Abstract

In today’s digital world the use of secret key is inevitable to any secure communication through the network. But human beings feel hard to recollect the lengthy cryptographic key. One solution to this would be the use of biometric characteristics of human beings which are unique in nature, that makes the attacker difficult to guess the key generated from these features. Here we propose a new scheme for multimodal biometric key generation to secure cryptographic communication. Initially, the feature points of fingerprint and iris image are extracted using SLGS feature extraction algorithm followed by which chaotic mechanism is applied to shuffle the feature vectors and finally fused them to produce a single biometric key. In this paper we also present a new image encryption technique using the multimodal biometric key, where we are able to reconstruct the secret image without any pixel quality loss.