Authentication of Biometric Features Using Texture Coding for ID Cards

The use of image based information exchange has grown rapidly over the years in terms of both electronic-to-electronic image storage and transmission and in terms of maintaining paper documents in electronic form. Further, with the dramatic improvements in the quality of COTS (Commercial-Off-The-Shelf) printing and scanning devices, the ability to counterfeit electronic and printed documents has become a widespread problem. Consequently, there has been an increasing demand to develop digital watermarking techniques which can be applied to both electronic and printed images (and documents) that can be authenticated, prevent unauthorized copying of their content and, in the case of printed documents, withstand abuse and degradation before and during scanning. In this paper we consider the background to a novel approach to solving this problem that has been developed into practically realisable system.