DCT and Homomorphic Encryption based Watermarking Scheme in Buyer-seller Watermarking Protocol

Abstract

Buyer-seller watermarking protocol is defined as the practice of imperceptible altering a digital content to embed a message using watermarking in the encryption domain. This protocol is acknowledged as one kind of copyright protection techniques in electronic commerce. Buyer-seller watermarking protocol is fundamentally based on public-key cryptosystem that is operating using the algebraic property of an integer. However, in general usage, digital contents which are handled in watermarking scheme mostly exist as real numbers in frequency domain through DCT, DFT, DWT, etc. Therefore, in order to use the watermarking scheme in a cryptographic protocol, digital contents that exist as real number must be transformed into integer type through preprocessing beforehand. In this paper, we presented a new watermarking scheme in an encrypted domain in an image that is based on the block-DCT framework and homomorphic encryption method for buyer-seller watermarking protocol. We applied integral-processing in order to modify the decimal layer. And we designed a direction-adaptive watermarking scheme by analyzing distribution property of the frequency coefficients in a block using JND threshold. From the experimental results, the proposed scheme was confirmed to have a good robustness and invisibility.