Tamper detection and self-recovery of biometric images using salient region-based authentication watermarking scheme

Biometric images can be split into regions of salient (ROI) and regions of background (ROB) based on salient region detection. During the process of watermark embedding, salient regions which contain rich-information are less affected by the watermark, therefore can be embedded into more watermarks, and regions of background (ROB) are susceptible to the effect of watermarks, so that they should be embedded lighter or even none in order to preserve the recognition quality of biometric images. In this paper, a novel scheme for tamper detection and self-recovery of biometric images using salient region-based authentication watermarking is proposed. Firstly, we propose a novel multi-level authentication watermarking scheme, which is used to verify the integrity of biometric images. Secondly, biometric data of these biometric images which is used as information watermarks is embedded into themselves. As a result, verification systems can recover the damaged data of original biometric images with hidden information based on tampering detection result. Experimental results and theoretic analysis show that our proposed scheme can detect tampered regions, and recover biometric data while keeping the recognition quality.