A Watermarking System Architecture using the Cellular Automata Transform for 2D Vector Map

Abstract

Technological advancement, paired with the emergence of increasingly open and sophisticated communication systems, has contributed to the growing complexity of copyright protection and ownership identification for digital content. The technique of digital watermarking has been receiving attention in the literature as a way to address these complexities. Digital watermarking involves covertly embedding a marker in a piece of digital data (e.g., a vector map, database, or audio, image, or video data) such that the marker cannot be edited, does not interfere with the quality or size of the data, and can be extracted accurately even under the deterioration of the watermarked data (e.g., as a consequence of malicious activity). The purpose of this paper is to describe a watermarking system architecture that can be applied to a 2D vector map. The proposed scheme involves embedding the watermark into the frequency domain, namely, the linear cellular automata transform (LCAT) algorithm. To evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme, the algorithm was applied to vector maps from the Riyadh Development Authority. The results indicate that the watermarking system architecture described here is efficient in terms of its computational complexity, reversibility, fidelity, and robustness against well-known attacks.