A Spatial Method for Watermarking of Fingerprint Images

This paper extends the watermarking method introduced in [1] in order to embed watermark data into fingerprint images, without corrupting their features. Two methods are proposed. The first method inserts watermark data after feature extraction thus prevents watermarking of regions used for fingerprint classification. The method utilizes an image adaptive strength adjustment technique which results in watermarks with low visibility. The second method introduces a feature adaptive watermarking technique for fingerprints, thus applicable before feature extraction. For both of the methods, decoding does not require original fingerprint image. Unlike most of the published spatial watermarking methods, the proposed methods provide high decoding accuracy for fingerprint images.