Securing biometric data by combining watermarking and cryptography

In this paper, we combined the modality of the fingerprint with that of the iris. This was done by merging the two biometric signatures by means of watermarking based on vector quantization. The proposed technique is based on the extraction of features from the fingerprint image to hide the iris code. This appeared to be the most obvious alternative, given the type of manipulated images. The robustness of this technique has been proven by a process of several tests known in the field of data transmission. Test results show that the proposed method is robust against JPEG compression. Other tests covered the attacks based on filtering, addition of noise, translation and rotations. Furthermore, we applied chaotic encryption with several alternatives on the watermarked fingerprint image to enhance the overall security of transmission. Results are satisfactory and very encouraging.