A fragile watermarking technique for fingerprint protection

This paper presents a fragile watermarking algorithm for biometric fingerprint images based on the run length pattern of pixels. The algorithm works with binary form of fingerprint images. The carrier image is converted into a one dimensional vector and the run lengths of the pixels are computed. The run length vector is then split into overlapping vector patterns of length three where the mid part of the vector is considered for watermark embedding. The watermark may be text data or a binary image. The new scheme has a good data embedding capacity. The paper also discusses the means to extract the embedded watermark.