A Tenable Approach for Protection of Electronic Medical Records Using Thermal Image Watermarking

Abstract

This paper presents a novel security architecture for protecting the integrity of facial signature images and templates using watermarking and Visual Cryptography (VC). The proposed scheme offers a complete protection framework for the facial signature biometrics consists of two stages: the first stage is for facial signature image protection while the second is for the facial signature template. Firstly, a watermark text which carries personal information of the patient is embedded in the middle band frequency region of the facial signature image using a novel watermarking algorithm that randomly interchanges multiple middle band pairs of the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). Secondly, the proposed algorithm is fully integrated and consolidates the critical steps of feature extraction. The novel approach at developing a thermal signature template ensured that unforeseen changes in the vasculature over time did not affect the biometric matching process as the authentication process relied only on consistent thermal features.