Watermark generation from fingerprint features for digital right management control

The conventional digital watermarking schemes uses an arbitrary digital pattern as the watermark which has limitations in proving ownership of the watermark. This paper proposes a proficient digital watermark generation technique from biometric data which will be unique and can be logically owned to prove ownership. The issue of ownership watermark is addressed in this paper. The biometric pattern of fingerprint is used to generate the digital watermark that has a stamp of ownership. The generated watermark has been studied for uniqueness and identification and has been used to watermark digital images. Discrete cosine transformation is used for embedding the watermark in the image. Experimental results indicate that the watermark can survive the signal processing attacks and maintain the perceptual properties of the host signal. The extracted biometric based watermark was uniquely identified under signal processing attacks by matching of the feature points.