Hiding a face in a fingerprint image

With the wide spread utilization of biometric identification systems, establishing the authenticity of biometric data itself has emerged as an important research issue. We present a fingerprint image watermarking method that can embed facial information into host fingerprint images. This scheme has the advantage that in addition to fingerprint matching, the recovered face during the decoding can be used to establish the authenticity of the fingerprint and the user. By computing the ROC curves on a fingerprint database of 160 individuals, we show the advantages of the proposed watermarking scheme. Further, our scheme does not introduce any significant degradation in the fingerprint matching performance.