A New Reversible Database Watermarking Approach with Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm

Abstract

In many fields such as medicine, science, transportation, it is often necessary to maintain the real-time information, and the data in the centralized database that saves data in these fields is distributed to various clients. On the insecure public Internet, there are distributed databases stored in data centers. Sharing may create risks, such as unauthorized copies, changes to data, and distribution of data to unauthorized persons for reuse. Many database watermarking methods have been proposed to protect digital rights. In order to reduce watermark distortion and increase watermark capacity, people pay more and more attention to the optimization of watermark technology. This paper proposes a method of embedding differential expansion watermarking (DEW) based on ant colony algorithm (ACO) in relational database. This method uses a secure hash algorithm for grouping, increasing the privacy of watermark embedding. The ant colony algorithm performs the optimization operation, finds the best attribute columns for embedding the watermark in the subgroup, and finally uses the differential expansion technology to embed the watermark. Experimental results show that compared with similar works reported in the literature, the reversible watermarking method based on ant colony algorithm database proposed in this paper not only increases the watermarking capacity, but also improves the robustness against various types of attacks.