LDPC and SHA based iris recognition for image authentication

Abstract

We introduce a novel way to authenticate an image using Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) and Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA) based iris recognition method with reversible watermarking scheme, which is based on Integer Wavelet Transform (IWT) and threshold embedding technique. The parity checks and parity matrix of LDPC encoding and cancellable biometrics i.e., hash string of unique iris code from SHA-512 are embedded into an image for authentication purpose using reversible watermarking scheme based on IWT and threshold embedding technique. Simply by reversing the embedding process, the original image, parity checks, parity matrix and SHA-512 hash are extracted back from watermarked-image. For authentication, the new hash string produced by employing SHA-512 on error corrected iris code from live person is compared with hash string extracted from watermarked-image. The LDPC code reduces the hamming distance for genuine comparisons by a larger amount than for the impostor comparisons. This results in better separation between genuine and impostor users which improves the authentication performance. Security of this scheme is very high due to the security complexity of SHA-512, which is 2256 under birthday attack. Experimental results show that this approach can assure more accurate authentication with a low false rejection or false acceptance rate and outperforms the prior arts in terms of PSNR.