FFT-Based Zero-Bit Watermarking for Facial Recognition and Its Security

The security of a system through biometric features is one of the acceptable trends to which every researcher recommends. Such biometric features contain features of iris, fingerprint, face, etc. Today, these security traits are widely exploited by an imposter to trace unlicensed access to the system. So it demands to secure these features since foremost alarming challenges are raises when these trustworthy features are compromised. This paper endorses the design of zero-bit watermarking in which a user’s unique id is integrated with his facial features in the multi-transform domain. The user’s unique ID is used to establish true authentication of the host facial features and also to recognize the face without any segmentation techniques. To make this effort tangible, Singular values are calculated of some particular frequency coefficients of the host image that are generated using FFT transformation in which a number of appropriate regions of the host image are selected based on their frequency of information. These Singular values of host facial image are calculated using SVD in which watermark (image) user’s unique ID is integrated correctly while maintaining the equilibrium among imperceptibility, robustness, and payload. The resultant watermarked image is tested against various image processing attacks and satisfying results are conducted to assure robustness of the model. Thus, the model is indeed satisfying security of the host biometric of the user.