  In this paper, we propose a novel scheme for data hiding in the fingerprint
minutiae template, which is the most popular in fingerprint recognition
systems. Various strategies are proposed in data embedding in order to maintain
the accuracy of fingerprint recognition as well as the undetectability of data
hiding. In bits replacement based data embedding, we replace the last few bits
of each element of the original minutiae template with the data to be hidden.
This strategy can be further improved using an optimized bits replacement based
data embedding, which is able to minimize the impact of data hiding on the
performance of fingerprint recognition. The third strategy is an order
preserving mechanism which is proposed to reduce the detectability of data
hiding. By using such a mechanism, it would be difficult for the attacker to
differentiate the minutiae template with hidden data from the original minutiae
templates. The experimental results show that the proposed data hiding scheme
achieves sufficient capacity for hiding common personal data, where the
accuracy of fingerprint recognition is acceptable after the data hiding.
