Improving biometric recognition accuracy and robustness using DWT and SVM watermarking

This paper presents a novel biometric watermarking algorithm for improving the recognition accuracy and protecting the face and fingerprint images from tampering. Multi-resolution Discrete Wavelet Transform is used for embedding the face image in a fingerprint image. An intelligent learning algorithm based on upsilon-Support Vector Machine (SVM) is introduced to enhance the quality of the extracted face image. The performance of the watermarking algorithm is experimentally validated using existing fingerprint and face recognition algorithms. The results show that the extracted fingerprint and face images are of high quality. The use of SVM enhances the performance of face recognition by at least 10% even when the watermarked image is subjected to certain geometric and frequency attacks such as scaling, cropping, compression and filtering.