Abstract:
To legally participate in any political elections in Kenya, one
must of necessity be in possession of at least two documents i.e.
the elector’s card and the national identity card. Both of these
documents make use of the bearer’s face photograph and some
textual identification information.
The unprecedented growth in digital imaging and processing
technologies have meant that, with little or no knowledge of the
technology involved one is conveniently able to tamper with
photographs and identity information on such documents
resulting in cases of fraud e.g double registration and voting
which have consistently marred our electoral process.
In this paper we propose the use of a general purpose smart card
based identification document during elections. The textual
identification information of the card bearer and his or her
biometric data are embedded in his or her face photograph using
an enhanced, randomized least significant bit steganographic
method.
An experimental design was setup to determine the effectiveness
of the method by comparing the original and the reconstructed
images’ statistical characteristics to ensure that no notable
differences exist.
The experimental results show improved security of the
biometric data and personal identification details.
