Verification of iris image authenticity using fragile watermarking

This paper proposes and evaluates a watermarking-based approach to certify the authenticity of iris images when they are captured by a genuine equipment. In the proposed method, the iris images are secretly signed before being used in biometric processes, and the resulting signature is embedded into the JPEG carrier image in the DCT domain in a data-dependent way. Any alteration of the original (certified) image makes the signature no longer corresponding to this image and this change can be quickly identified at the receiver site. Hence, it is called fragile watermarking to differentiate this method from regular watermarking that should present some robustness against image alterations. There is no need to attach any auxiliary signature data, hence the existing, already standardized transmission channels and storage protocols may be used. The embedding procedure requires to remove some part of the original information. But, by using the BATH dataset comprising 32 000 iris images collected for 1 600 distinct eyes, we verify that the proposed alterations have no impact on iris recognition reliability, although statistically significant, small differences in genuine score distributions are observed when the watermark is embedded to both the enrollment and verification iris images. This is a unique evaluation of how the watermark embedding of digital signatures into the ISO CROPPED iris images (during the enrollment, verification or both) influences the reliability of a well-established, commercial iris recognition methodology. Without loss in generality, this approach is targeted to biometric-enabled ID documents that deploy iris data to authenticate the holder of the document.