A Robust Double-Blind Secure High Capacity Watermarking and Information Hiding Scheme For Authentication and Tampering Recovery Via the Wavelet and Arnold Transforms

Abstract

In many communication applications, which involve exchange of digital information of high value, there is a need for secure exchange and authentication of digital information. In this paper and for that particular reason, we are proposing a novel double blind image information hiding technique for recovery and authentication of digital information without requiring knowledge and existence of both the authentication watermark image and the carrier image at a receiving end. We show here how a watermark image information for authentication is embedded in a given carrier. This makes the proposed scheme independent of the carrier image and the watermark image, which can be arbitrary. Here we utilize the properties of the Discrete Wavelet Transform (domain) and Arnold’s Transform algorithm to implement the proposed algorithm. Our proposed technique shows that (a) additional information is not required for the integrity check of the hidden digital information, (b) recovery of the hidden information from cropping and other attacks, (c) improved security is achieved by making extraction of the hidden information inter dependent on the watermarked image, (d) the scheme has high capacity and allows embedding of gray-scale (versus binary) images of same size as a carrier image. The proposed scheme provides localization and recovery towards tampering such as blurring, pixel tampering, and so forth. Effect of JPEG compression and encryption on the quality of the extracted hidden information is also shown.