Abstract: An efficient scheme is presented for protecting the ownership of the digital image content by applying iris feature watermarking. The main idea is as follows. Iris image preprocessing is conducted firstly, which includes iris image de-noising based on wavelet analysis, a coarse- to- precise iris localization, normalization and wavelet-based feature codes extraction, with the watermark generated by the operation between the iris codes and NVF. The second and third steps deal with adaptive iris-based watermark embedding and detecting using the human visual system (HVS) and independent component analysis (ICA). The final step is authentication between the iris codes transformed from the extracted watermark and the iris database. An adaptive PSNR metric is proposed for the more objective evaluation of the watermarking system. Experimental results show that the algorithm has good performance in dealing with various kinds of attack.

Key words: iris recognition, iris feature watermarking, image content, authentication, copyright protection