A new technique for performance improvement of fingerprint-based user authentication systems is proposed. This technique uses fragile watermarking to hide the extracted feature vector of the fingerprint image in the stored database. The results of watermark detection process and fingerprint matching are combined using Dampster-Shafer combination theory to improve the user authentication performance. This fragile watermarking algorithm is also used to protect the database from tampering. A robust watermarking algorithm is also presented to protect the authentication system against replay attacks.

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