In this paper, a security solution during communication and transmission of fingerprint data is proposed in the form of a novel encryption technique based on reversible hidden transform (RHT) and fractional wavelet packet transform (FrWPT). The core idea of the proposed technique is to change the gray values in the spatial domain using RHT followed by the deformation of FrWPT coefficients by singular value decomposition and chaotic map. Hence, security solution relies on both spatial and frequency domains. Finally, a reliable decryption scheme is also presented to reconstruct the original fingerprint image from the encrypted image. Experimental results and security analysis demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of the proposed scheme. © 2012 IEEE.