Multi-agent system for intelligent watermarking of fingerprint images

This paper presents a multi- agent system architecture for intelligent watermarking for securing fingerprint images. The proposed watermarking method uses a fuzzy-PSO based hybrid approach to secure a person´s fingerprint image by watermarking it with its corresponding face image. As fingerprint databases are large, processing huge image data in real time is difficult. The proposed work uses a multi-agent system as a distributed system for performing watermarking of fingerprint images, where various subtasks are performed in parallel in the distributed system. For watermarking input fingerprints, each image is divided into blocks and type-2 fuzzy logic is used to calculate the watermarking strength of each block based on its features. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is used to find optimum DCT coefficients of the image block to be used for watermark embedding in such a way that the quality and minutia matching ability of the host fingerprint are preserved. The proposed system WoFMAS (Watermarking of Fingerprints using Multi-Agent System) has multiple agents working on different blocks of the input fingerprint concurrently for efficiently distributing data and gathering results. The experimental study is done on the FVC 2004 fingerprint database and the results show that our hybrid approach gives better results in terms of watermarked image quality and robustness than other fuzzy based and other PSO based approaches in the literature.