Securing Biometric Images using Reversible Watermarking

Biometric security is a fast growing area. Protecting biometric data is very important since it canbe misused by attackers. In order to increase security of biometric data there are differentmethods in which watermarking is widely accepted. A more acceptable, new importantdevelopment in this area is reversible watermarking in which the original image can becompletely restored and the watermark can be retrieved. But reversible watermarking inbiometrics is an understudied area. Reversible watermarking maintains high quality of biometricdata. This paper proposes Rotational Replacement of LSB as a reversible watermarkingscheme for biometric images. PSNR is the regular method used for quality measurement ofbiometric data. In this paper we also show that SSIM Index is a better alternate for effectivequality assessment for reversible watermarked biometric data by comparing with the well knownreversible watermarking scheme using Difference Expansion.