Blind multipurpose watermarking with insertion of a single watermark: a generic construction based on verifiable threshold secret sharing

Abstract

Currently, the existing literature on multipurpose watermarking employs multiple watermarks for simultaneous achieving of multiple security objectives. This approach can be problematic since a watermark targeting tampers might fail to detect tampering of another watermark inserted for copyright violation. Moreover, most of the current schemes follow a non-blind approach where the original watermark is needed for authentication. A question that naturally arises is whether multipurpose watermarking can be realised with the insertion of a single watermark in a blind way or not. The goal of the authors study is to provide an affirmative answer to this important question. They show how a cryptographic primitive called verifiable threshold secret sharing can be used to come up with a generic construction for blind multipurpose watermarking which inserts a single watermark into the host image for simultaneous achieving of copyright protection, authentication, and tamper localisation. The generic property of the proposed scheme provides flexibility for choosing the embedding/extraction of the watermark based on the desired level of fidelity, robustness and capacity. Experimental results are provided to confirm the superiority of their proposed technique as compared to existing approaches.