Multi-level signature based biometric authentication using watermarking

Abstract

In the last decade a lot of efforts have been devoted to the development of biometrics-based authentication systems. In this paper we propose a signature-based biometric authentication system, where watermarking techniques are used to embed some dynamic signature features in a static representation of the signature itself, stored either in a centralized database or in a smartcard. The user authentication can be performed either by using some static features extracted from the acquired signature or by using both the aforementioned static features together with the dynamic features embedded in the enrollment stage. A multi-level authentication system, which is capable to provide various degree of security, is thus obtained. The proposed watermarking techniques are tailored to images with sharp edges, like a signature picture, in order to obtain a robust embedding method while keeping intact the original structure of the host signal. Experimental results show the two different levels of security which can be reached when either static features or both static and dynamic features are employed in the authentication process.