A Digital Image watermarking system for Securing Multimodal biometric modalities using Whale Optimization Algorithm.

Authentication and identification has become a big challenge in this fast growing world. The traditional method of identifying an individual includes PIN number, user name, password etc., and those techniques are easily duplicated, misused or shared. To avoid the above pitfalls, biometric comes into existence. Biometric system is an automatic identification of an individual using their physiological or behavioral traits. These biometric traits are stored in the database digitally. Nowadays, since data breach has become quite common, leakage of these biometric traits has a direct impact on the individual. Hence, the biometric traits are secured using one of the information hiding techniques named digital watermarking. Robustness and imperceptibility are the two predominant factors of watermarking system. In this article, multimodal biometric traits such as fingerprint and iris are fused using Gradient Pyramid algorithm (GP).This fused biometric template acts as watermark. The watermark is then embedding into the cover image, Lena of size 256X256. Whale optimization algorithm (WOA) is used to find the optimum position to embed the watermark in order to improve the robustness of the watermark. Performance of WOA is measured using the performance measures such as Peak-Signal-Noise-Ratio (PSNR), Normalized cross correlation (NCC) and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM).The algorithm is more robust when compared with other existing algorithms with a PSNR of 90.3420 SSIM as 1 and NC as 1.