Double watermarking‐based biometric access control for radio frequency identification card

Abstract

The integration of data privacy and security into radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, particularly into RFID tags, has become one of the most attractive research areas. A crucial challenge in RFID technology research lies in providing an efficient protection for systems against information theft and illegitimate access. This article proposes a secure solution based on an RFID card for physical biometric access-control applications. This is done by integrating two biometric modalities, namely face and fingerprint which are secured via a double watermarking technique. The suggested approach is ensured by two levels of watermarking. At the first level, the wavelet packet decomposition watermarking algorithm is used to insert features from the fingerprint (minutiae) in the face image of an authorized person. At the second level, the same watermarking algorithm is employed to insert the fingerprint watermark in the face features extracted by Gabor filters from the previously watermarked face image (at the first level). The obtained secured watermarked biometric data are then integrated in a 1-kB high frequency proximity RFID card. This combination of both RFID technology and the double watermarking technique provides a biometric control access framework. Compared with the state-of-the-art frameworks, the proposed one ensures a good compromise between a reduced computational complexity and a high level of data security while maintaining a small space of storage and a low cost compared to those of the marketed products.