Data hiding for multimodal biometric recognition

Data hiding has been successfully applied lately in a variety of applications, other than copyright protection. A data hiding technique applied in a multimodal biometric system for automatic recognition is introduced in this paper. Specifically, both the voice and iris patterns acquired by an individual are hidden in certain wavelet coefficients of his fingerprint image using block classification and the embedded biometric template is further compressed. The proposed technique achieves a reduction of the system data rate, as opposed to the conventional independent compression and storage of each biometric signal. At the same time, accurate data reconstruction is guaranteed, enabling a successful recognition process based on the combination of three biometric modalities.