A Watermarking Technique for User Authentication Based on a Combination of Face Image and Device Identity in a Mobile Ecosystem

Digital content protection has recently become an important requirement in biometrics-based authentication systems due to the challenges involved in designing a feasible and effective user authentication method. Biometric approaches are more effective than traditional methods, and simultaneously, they cannot be considered entirely reliable. This study develops a reliable and trustworthy method for verifying that the owner of the biometric traits is the actual user and not an impostor. Watermarking-based approaches are developed using a combination of a color face image of the user and a mobile equipment identifier (MEID). Employing watermark techniques that cannot be easily removed or destroyed, a blind image watermarking scheme based on fast discrete curvelet transform (FDCuT) and discrete cosine transform (DCT) is proposed. FDCuT is applied to the color face image to obtain various frequency coefficients of the image curvelet decomposition, and for high frequency curvelet coefficients DCT is applied to obtain various frequency coefficients. Furthermore, mid-band frequency coefficients are modified using two uncorrelated noise sequences with the MEID watermark bits to obtain a watermarked image. An analysis is carried out to verify the performance of the proposed schema using conventional performance metrics. Compared with an existing approach, the proposed approach is better able to protect multimedia data from unauthorized access and will effectively prevent anyone other than the actual user from using the identity or images.