Digital watermarking and information hiding using wavelets, SLSB and Visual Cryptography method

Watermarking technique is increasingly used in the protection of biometric data against accidental and intentional attacks. Biometric watermarking is a technique that creates a link between a human subject and the digital media by embedding biometric information into the digital object. Among the various biometrics, iris has gained more popularity in the authentication area. The reason behind their popularity is that they unique and hence can be used during personal identification. Another area is information hiding where secret messages are stored inside a message. In this paper, a novel hybrid method to hide an iris image and secret message into a cover image using Discrete Wavelet Transformation (DWT), SLSB (Selected Least Significant Bit) and Visual Cryptography (VC) is proposed. Results show that the recognition rate after dewatermarking is high and the proposed system can resist various attacks while maintaining the visual quality of the cover image and text message.