Robust biometric watermarking based on Contourlet transform for fingerprint and face protection

This paper presents a novel biometric watermarking algorithm that embeds a face image data into fingerprint image. The proposed algorithm is based on Contourlet transform and quantization. TC (Texture Complexity) is computed for selecting the optimum blocks to embed watermarks. The watermarking algorithm is robust to JPEG, Gaussian noise and filtering attacks. It protects the integrity of both the face and fingerprint images. Experimental results performed on the databases of face and fingerprint images show that the algorithm improved security and recognize rate.