Title: Hiding biometric features in audio signals using Gram-Schmidt orthogonalisation

Authors: Arashdeep Kaur; Malay Kishore Dutta; K.M. Soni; Nidhi Taneja

Addresses: Amity School of Engineering and Technology, Amity University, Noida, Uttar Pradesh, 201313, India ' Amity School of Engineering and Technology, Amity University, Noida, Uttar Pradesh, 201313, India ' Amity School of Engineering and Technology, Amity University, Noida, Uttar Pradesh, 201313, India ' Indira Gandhi Delhi Technological University for Women (IGDTUW), Inter State Bus Terminal, Kashmere Gate, Near Kashmere Gate Metro Station, New Delhi, Delhi 110006, India

Abstract: This paper presents a method of imperceptibly inserting a biometric-based digital watermark generated from iris image in an audio signal. The use of biometric features as a watermark is proposed in this paper to address the issue of ownership of digital watermark and digital content. There is a need to design special audio watermarking algorithm which can accommodate biometric-based watermark without disturbing robustness and perceptual transparency as biometric-based watermarks are generally larger in size. The algorithm is designed using Gram-Schmidt orthogonalisation in third level detailed coefficients of multi-resolution decomposition to achieve high payload with good robustness such that watermark is not audible to human auditory system. The embedding capacity of the proposed method is evaluated to be 480 bps and the highest SNR achieved is 41.519 dB. Experimental results validate that the biometric watermark extracted even under different attack situations can be identified uniquely in the iris database.

Keywords: Gram-Schmidt orthogonalisation; authentication; multi-resolution decomposition; biometric features; biometric feature hiding; biometrics; audio signals; digital watermarking; iris images; digital content; ownership; security; audio watermarking.

DOI: 10.1504/IJESDF.2016.073735

International Journal of Electronic Security and Digital Forensics, 2016 Vol.8 No.1, pp.63 - 81

Received: 28 Mar 2015
Accepted: 30 Sep 2015
Published online: 16 Dec 2015 *

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