Using SVD and DWT based steganography to enhance the security of watermarked fingerprint images

Watermarking is the process of embedding information into a carrier file for the protection of ownership/copyright of digital media, whilst steganography is the art of hiding information. This paper presents, a hybrid steganographic watermarking algorithm based on Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) transforms in order to enhance the security of digital fingerprint images. A facial watermark is embedded into fingerprint image using a method of singular value replacement. First, the DWT is used to decompose the fingerprint image from the spatial domain to the frequency domain and then the facial watermark is embedded in singular values (SV's) obtained by application of SVD. In addition, the original fingerprint image is not required to extract the watermark. Experimental results provided demonstrate the methods robustness to image degradation and common signal processing attacks, such as histogram and filtering, noise addition, JPEG and JPEG2000 compression with various levels of quality.