DCT Watermarking Approach for Security Enhancement of Multimodal System

We have addressed a novel watermarking algorithm to support the capacity demanded by the multimodal biometric templates. Proposed technique embeds watermark in low frequency AC coefficients of selected 8 × 8 DCT blocks. Selection of blocks accomplishes perceptual transparency by exploiting the masking effects of human visual system (HVS). Embedding is done by modulating the coefficient magnitude as a function of its estimated value. Neighborhood estimation is used for the weighted DC coefficients from eight neighboring DCT blocks. The weights of the DC coefficients are calculated from local image intrinsic property. For our experimentation we have used iris and finger prints as the two templates which are watermarked into standard test images. The robustness of the proposed algorithm is compared with the few state-of-the-art literature when watermarked image is subjected to common channel attacks.