A Robust Digital Watermarking Algorithm for Copyright Protection of Aerial Photogrammetric Images

Abstract

AbstractCurrent research on digital watermarking for the copyright protection of digital multimedia data has led to fairly advanced techniques with fruitful results. However, there remains a lack of research on digital watermarking for geospatial data, which is very costly to produce but is of great importance and with wide application. In this study an analysis and discussion of digital watermarking is carried out for digital aerial photogrammetric images. Focusing on the requirements for the main applications of such images, a feature‐based digital watermarking algorithm is proposed. Testing and analysis of the robustness of the watermark is performed to achieve the goal of copyright protection, even after image processing and geometric transformation have been undertaken on the watermarked image. Furthermore, the image quality is (almost) preserved to avoid detrimental effects on subsequent applications. The experimental results prove that the proposed watermarking method has a certain degree of robustness and can resist most types of image‐processing and geometric attacks, while maintaining the data quality of the aerial images.