Securing Biometric Images using Reversible Watermarking

TL;DR

This paper introduces a reversible watermarking scheme called Rotational Replacement of LSB for biometric images, enhancing security while allowing complete data restoration and proposing SSIM as a superior quality metric.

Contribution

It presents a novel reversible watermarking method for biometric images and compares SSIM with PSNR for quality assessment, filling a gap in biometric data security research.

Findings

Rotational Replacement of LSB effectively watermark biometric images.

SSIM index outperforms PSNR in quality assessment.

The proposed scheme maintains high biometric data quality.

Abstract

Biometric security is a fast growing area. Protecting biometric data is very important since it can be misused by attackers. In order to increase security of biometric data there are different methods in which watermarking is widely accepted. A more acceptable, new important development in this area is reversible watermarking in which the original image can be completely restored and the watermark can be retrieved. But reversible watermarking in biometrics is an understudied area. Reversible watermarking maintains high quality of biometric data. This paper proposes Rotational Replacement of LSB as a reversible watermarking scheme for biometric images. PSNR is the regular method used for quality measurement of biometric data. In this paper we also show that SSIM Index is a better alternate for effective quality assessment for reversible watermarked biometric data by comparing with the well known reversible watermarking scheme using Difference Expansion.