Effects of watermarking on iris recognition performance

Protection of biometric data and templates is a crucial issue for the security of biometric systems, and biometric watermarking is introduced for this purpose. However, watermarking introduces extra information into the biometric data (biometric images or biometric feature templates) which leads to certain distortion. In addition, watermarked images are always subject to the risk of being attacked. Hence, whether and how biometric recognition performance will be affected by biometric watermarking deserves investigation. In this paper, we make a first attempt in such investigations by studying two application scenarios in the context of iris recognition, namely protection of iris templates by hiding them in cover images as watermarks (iris watermarks), and protection of iris images by watermarking them. Experimental results suggest that watermark embedding in iris images does not introduce detectable decreases on iris recognition performance whereas recognition performance drops significantly if iris watermarks suffer from severe attacks.