A hybrid encryption/hiding method for secure transmission of biometric data in multimodal authentication system

Biometric security is a fast growing area that gains an increasing interest in the last decades. Digital encryption and hiding techniques provide an efficient solution to protect biometric data from accidental or intentional attacks. In this paper, a highly secure encryption/hiding scheme is proposed to ensure secure transmission of biometric data in multimodal biometric identification/authentication system. The secret fingerprint and iris vectors are sparsely approximated using accelerated iterative hard thresholding technique and then embedded in the host Slantlet-SVD domain of face image. Experiments demonstrate the efficiency of our technique for both encryption and hiding purpose, where the secret biometric information is well encrypted and still extractable with high fidelity even though the carrier image is seriously corrupted. Our experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed technique in term of robustness to attacks, Invisibility, and security.