An efficient and secure digital image watermarking using features from iris image

The existing digital watermarking schemes use a digital pattern like pseudorandom number sequence, a logo image or a digital signature as the watermark. Use of such watermarks is not convincing as the ownership of such a watermark is not clear for ownership claims. This paper proposes an efficient digital watermark generation technique from biometric iris data which will be unique and can be owned to prove ownership. The issue of ownership of digital watermark is addressed in this paper. The biometric pattern of iris image is used to generate the digital watermark that has a stamp of ownership. The digital pattern generated the from the iris image is found to be unique and can be clearly used for identification. Discrete cosine transformation is used for watermarking the digital image. Experimental results indicate that the watermark can survive the signal processing attacks and maintain the perceptual properties of the host signal satisfying the design requirements of digital watermarking. The extracted biometric based watermark was uniquely identified under signal processing attacks using correlation based methods.