Digital Gray-Scale Watermarking Based on Biometrics

In this paper, a technical solution of digital gray-scale watermarking for law enforcement and copyright protection for digital media is developed. The biometrically generated keys provide higher level of security, when a key is created using biometrical information, in our case-the fingerprint images. First, feature points and, second, fast binary descriptors are applied for secret keys creation. Also a map of feature points is used to randomize the embedded watermark. A blind scheme of gray-scale watermark transform is implemented, when the secret keys ought to be transferred through a secret channel without necessity to transfer whole host image. Two types of transforms such as Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) are investigated for embedding of watermark in a host image. Numerical estimations of attacked image restoration show a superiority of the DWT for geometric attacks including shifts and rotations.