CONTENT-BASED BIOMETRIC IMAGE HIDING APPROACH

Abstract

Recently, the use of information hiding techniques to protect biometric data has been an active topic. This paper proposes a novel image hiding approach based on correlation analysis to protect network-based transmitted biometric image for identification. Firstly, the correlation between the biometric image and the cover image is analyzed using principal component analysis (PCA) and genetic algorithm (GA). The purpose of correlation analysis is to enable the cover image to represent the secret image in content as much as possible, not just as a carrier of hidden information. Then, the unrepresented part of the biometric image, as the secret image, is encrypted and hidden into the middle-significant-bit plane (MSB) of the cover image redundantly. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed hiding approach not only gains good imperceptibility, but also resists some common attacks validated by the biometric identification accuracy.