Robust watermarking in iris recognition: application scenarios and impact on recognition performance

Watermarking has been suggested as a means to improve security of biometric systems. We discuss application scenarios for resolving various security issues in this context. As embedding watermarks changes biometric data, degraded recognition performance using such data may be expected. We experimentally investigate the impact of applying a set of blind robust watermarking schemes on the recognition performance of two iris recognition algorithms. We find that different watermarking schemes result in a very different amount of impact rendering the choice of a particular watermarking scheme an important issue to be considered in the investigated context.