Joint Encryption and Compression-Based Watermarking Technique for Security of Digital Documents

Abstract

Recently, due to the increase in popularity of the Internet, the problem of digital data security over the Internet is increasing at a phenomenal rate. Watermarking is used for various notable applications to secure digital data from unauthorized individuals. To achieve this, in this article, we propose a joint encryption then-compression based watermarking technique for digital document security. This technique offers a tool for confidentiality, copyright protection, and strong compression performance of the system. The proposed method involves three major steps as follows: (1) embedding of multiple watermarks through non-sub-sampled contourlet transform, redundant discrete wavelet transform, and singular value decomposition; (2) encryption and compression via SHA-256 and Lempel Ziv Welch (LZW), respectively; and (3) extraction/recovery of multiple watermarks from the possibly distorted cover image. The performance estimations are carried out on various images at different attacks, and the efficiency of the system is determined in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and normalized correlation (NC), structural similarity index measure (SSIM), number of changing pixel rate (NPCR), unified averaged changed intensity (UACI), and compression ratio (CR). Furthermore, the comparative analysis of the proposed system with similar schemes indicates its superiority to them.