Securing Biometric Images using Reversible Watermarking

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.