Robust Biometric Image Watermarking System

Authors

Ramamoorthy.S, Dinesh.K.B, Karthikeyan.M.R, Sruthi Varrier.M,Rahini.C.

Abstract

Products Used LABVIEW 8.5 Express, Grabber card, Compact Data Acquisition Card, Finger

print sensor, Webcam/Digital camera

Objective:

To Develop a full featured, secured, robustic BIOMETRIC System Using Watermarking technique with combined DWT (Discrete Wavelet Transform) and LSB(Least Significant Bit) to securely embeds a face template in finger print image.

Solution: Developing Biometric system Using VI Environment

KEYWORDS: DWT, Security, Watermarking, LSB, IDWT.

Terms used

DWT - Discrete Wavelet Transform

LSB - Least Significant Bit.

IDWT - Inverse Discrete Wavelet Transform

Introduction

Various schemes for data hiding are developed recently. According to the purposes of data hiding, these systems are classified in to two categories: Watermarking and steganography. Watermarking is a protecting technique which protects the author’s property right for images by some hidden watermarks or confidential data from the unintended internet users.

With the growing popularity of Biometric system it needs more and more security to prevent our valuable property from unauthorized person. The new data hiding techniques need to be developed that satisfy the requirements of imperceptibility, robustness, capacity, or data hiding rate and security of the hidden data etc. At this juncture, DWT and LSB play the role of an efficient tool because of multi resolution capability that highlights the local and global property of the signal. Data embedding in image characteristics regions expected to show resiliency against different types of the unintentional and /or deliberate attacks.

Brief Description

In the present scenario the Biometrics based authentication systems have inherent advantage over traditional personal identification techniques. But the critical problem is to ensure the security and integrity of biometric data. The watermarking techniques combined with DWT and LSB will give more security for the data. Bit Plane modulation in wavelet domain is to be developed to provide resiliency against volumetric distortion sources, on the other hand LSB is used to provide resiliency against geometric attacks. The main concepts used here is Digital Image Processing, DWT and LSB.

Digital Image Processing: The function of DIP is Image acquisition, Image enhancement, Image restoration, color image processing, Wavelets, compression, Morphological Processing, segmentation, Representation & Description, Object Recognition.

DWT: DWT is known to one of the most useful techniques for multi resolution image analysis. The Wavelet scheme provides a powerful and flexible set of tools for handling problems in noise removal signal, image compression etc. It can be implemented by using two channel filter banks composed of a low pass and high pass filter and each filter bank is then sampled at a half of the previous frequency. By repeating this procedure, it is possible to obtain the wavelets transform of any order. LSB: The most frequently used data hiding method is the technique of

LSB substitution. In a gray-level image, every pixel consists of 8 bits. One pixel can hence display 28 =256 variations. This embedding procedure does not affect the original pixel value greatly. For spatial domain Watermarking methods the processing is applied on the image pixels directly. In other words watermarked is embedded in image by modifying the pixel values. The advantage of this type of watermarking is easy and computationally fast.

How to Implement in NI environment: At first we have to create a sub VI for DWT algorithm, LSB algorithm, and the processor in Labview environment. For other environments like matlab, TMS320c6711 processor is needed to interface this algorithms and external device like finger print sensor and web camera or digital camera. But in Labview we can design the processor for the particular function. After creating the processor in Labview we have to load those algorithms (DWT, LSB) in that processor. By using the data acquisition card we can interface the system with that fingerprint sensor and by using grabber card we can interface the system with webcam or digital camera.

Working Principle: The details (watermarked finger print image with face template) of any industry employee or any organization staffs are stored in reference database of the Biometric System. After that if anybody from that organization place their finger in that finger print sensor, that will capture their finger print by finger print sensor and face by webcam, then it will form a watermarked image and compare with that reference data, whether that person is authorized one or not.

Benefits of using VI in this project Efficient system with faster performance compared to manual TMS Processor in MATLAB based system. Space requirements are less due to usage of Lab VIEW environment. More Security when compared to present Biometric system.