Watermarking of digital media with encrypted biometric features for digital ownership

This paper proposes a proficient digital watermark generation technique from encrypted biometric data which will be unique and can be logically owned to prove ownership of digital media. During the use of biometric data as the watermark exposure of biometric data may not be secure and hence this paper proposes a method to encrypt the biometric data using chaotic maps sensitive to secret key for enhancing the security. This joint encryption and watermarking scheme has the potential of addressing the ownership of digital signals and keep the biometric data secure. Arnold transformation is used to encrypt the biometric data and discrete cosine transformation is used for embedding the watermark in the image. Experimental results indicate that the watermark can survive the signal processing and maintain the perceptual properties of the host signal and hence satisfies the design requirements of digital watermarking. The extracted biometric based watermark after decryption was uniquely identified under signal processing attacks by matching of the feature points.