Tampering Reveal Technique for Iris Images

Abstract

Nowadays, many biometric based security systems depend on the iris images for authentication because of their features and ease of use. However, storing and sharing these sensitive images through open access networks will expose them to tampering. In order to ensure the safety of the iris images, this paper presents a new tampering reveal technique based on watermarking in the transform domain. In the proposed technique, the iris region is selected and isolated using interactive segmentation process (ISA). The authentication bits have been generated from the iris region (IR) and embedded in the Slantlet transform coefficients of the remaining part of the iris image which has been named as non-iris region (NIR). The use of ISA ensures the intactness of IR because it has been excluded from the embedding process. Several experiments have been conducted to test the visual quality, capacity, payload, and the tampering reveal performance. The experiments proved the ability of the proposed technique to reveal and localize any tampering in IR, in addition, the difference between the original iris image and the watermarked iris image is imperceptible