An Improved Commutative Reversible Watermarking and Encryption for Fingerprint Image

Abstract

A fingerprint system database requires: 1. immunity against offensives like unauthorized data injection, denial of service; 2. privacy protection. Ensuring commutativity between reversible watermarking and encryption concurrently satisfy both requirements. However, reversible watermarking in existing commutative schemes has a security hole. Their fingerprint database can be manipulated by watermark substitution and most significant bit tampering. The proposed method improves reversible watermarking in the commutative scheme. Experimental results shows that the improved scheme is tamper-proof against watermark substitution and most significant bit tampering. It effectively avoids unauthorized data injection and denial of service through database.