Fingerprint authentication enhancement using combination of DWT and DCT

This paper proposes a new watermarking method to embed multiple watermarks into fingerprint image. The watermarking approach utilizes the strengths of Discrete Wavelet Transform and Discrete Cosine Transform methods to integrate grayscale facial image of the fingerprint owner and other identification information in the form of a binary text image into the fingerprint image. The grayscale facial image is first compressed and converted to binary using a JPEG compression technique. The converted binary facial image is then embedded into the LH1 sub-band while the binary text image is embedded into the HL1 sub-band of a 1-level DWT of the host fingerprint image. Fingerprint minutiae are not affected by the embedding process. The results show that the proposed DWT-DCT algorithm is capable of secure embedding of larger facial and text watermark images in digital fingerprint image. The quantitative evaluation of the developed watermarking algorithm on a large database of digital fingerprint images showed good results with computed PSNR, MSE, Correlation, SSIM, and UIQI values for the extracted facial, text, and watermarked fingerprint images.