Fragile Watermarking Technique Research Articles

A reversible fragile watermarking technique using fourier transform and Fibonacci Q-matrix for medical image authentication

Image authentication techniques are crucial for a multitude of multimedia applications. When images are transmitted through non-secure channels like the internet, they are vulnerable to unauthorized alterations and manipulations. Therefore, it is essential in sensitive fields, like the medical industry, to employ image authentication techniques to guarantee the integrity and authenticity of transmitted images. In this paper, to address these security issues and to ensure the authenticity of medical images, we present a reversible fragile watermarking model where the watermark is first generated from the cover image using DCT and then encrypted by the Fibonacci Q-matrix technique, enhancing the model’s security. Subsequently, DFT is performed on the host image and the obtained sub-band is segmented into 2 × 2 blocks, the watermark is then embedded within the frequency coefficients using a new embedding technique. Experimental results indicates that the presented model produces a great watermarked image quality, with a PSNR superior to 117 dB, while maintaining an acceptable embedding capacity of 0.25 BPP and high sensitivity to various attacks, as it was tested against 16 different attacks and could detect tampering in all of them. Furthermore, the presented scheme offers nearly perfect reversibility with a PSNR of 324 dB, which is very useful in the medical field where we need images with as little distortion as possible.

CADEN: cellular automata and DNA based secure framework for privacy preserving in IoT based healthcare.

In the present E-healthcare industry, data breaches result in substantial economic losses due to cyber-attacks and hence create a trust deficit between the industry and users. The healthcare industry has rapidly adopted IoT frameworks but the trust deficit and privacy concerns limit its utilization among the masses. Along with privacy protection, content authentication is an important requirement in a number of critical applications and fragile watermarking provides an effective solution. However, existing fragile watermarking techniques lack the accuracy of tamper detection and hence are not reliable enough in terms of security and privacy of the data. This paper presents a novel low-complexity block-based fragile watermarking technique with high security against cyber-security attacks. This is achieved by embedding a fragile watermark in the host image using pixel domain blocking approach. The security of embedded watermark has been taken care of by using Cellular Automata and DNA based ENcryption (CADEN) framework to scramble the watermark bits using various secret keys. Experimental investigations show that besides being highly secure, the proposed technique is fragile to various signal processing and geometric attacks. The comparative analysis shows that the proposed scheme, despite having lower complexity, offers better efficiency in terms of imperceptibility, tamper detection and localization compared to other state-of-the-art techniques. Besides, the fragile watermark embedding makes the system capable to preserve the secret information in case of an attack with an average BER of 40%.

Evaluation of a Framework for Robust Image Reversible Watermarking

In the literature, robust reversible watermarking schemes (RWSs) allow the extraction of watermarks after the images have suffered attacks; however, the modified images are compromised. On the other hand, self-recovery schemes will restore the compromised regions of the images, but no secret messages are inserted in these schemes. A framework for robust reversible watermarking with signal restoration capabilities was previously proposed in the literature. This study selects four fragile reversible watermarking techniques and two self-recovery schemes to design different framework configurations. These configurations are evaluated to test the framework’s performance and determine the structure that yields better results in terms of perceptual transparency using a well-known image database as the signal input. It was found that fragile reversible watermarking schemes hold low perceptual distortion, while self-recovery schemes produce high perceptual distortion levels. The inherent characteristics of each algorithm determine, a priori, the behavior of the framework, which is approximated by a proposed equation.

A novel Frei‐Chen based fragile watermarking method for authentication of an image

AbstractIn recent years, the protection of the intellectual property rights of digital media has become a considerable issue. Especially using digital image editing tools has made it very easy and fast to manipulate images. Therefore, manipulation detection of digital images has become a necessity. This article presents a novel Frei‐Chen based self‐embedding fragile watermarking technique implemented to blocks for image manipulate detection. The block key and the Frei‐Chen based block feature are calculated from the non‐overlapping image blocks of size . Exclusive‐OR operations are applied to the Frei‐Chen based block feature and the block key. After, a nine bit block authentication key is generated from the Frei‐Chen based block feature and the block key. Then the generated authentication key is embedded in the least significant bits of each block. Experimental results prove the effectiveness of the proposed method through the detection of the various attacks and obtain the excellent visual quality of watermarked images. Also, the results demonstrate that the proposed method detects all of the manipulated areas plainly.

Fragile Watermarking Framework for Tamper Detection of Color Biometric Images

Application of fragile watermarking on biometric images stored at a server or cloud ensures proper authentication and tamper detection when access to the servers was shared. In this paper, a hybrid domain fragile watermarking technique for authenticity of color biometric images, using hybridization of various transforms such as discrete cosine transform (DCT), fast discrete curvelet transform (FDCuT), and singular value decomposition (SVD) is proposed. The hybrid transform coefficients are modified according to the scrambled color watermark to obtain watermarked color biometric image. The security of this technique is strengthened with the usage of Arnold scrambling, and by using multiple secret keys. The proposed technique is analyzed on FEI Brazilian face database. The experimental results show that this technique performs better than the existing fragile watermarking techniques.

A Semi-Fragile Watermarking Scheme for Integrity Checking of Relational Databases

Extensive use of the Internet coupled with tremendous growth in database applications have created a huge demand for database security. The concepts of e-governance, e-commerce, e-business, e-learning, and digital libraries are already in place and evolving across poles. This raises various concomitant threats such as illegal copying, illegal redistribution, tampering, forgery and authentication of copyrighted digital assets. Digital Watermarking is an effective technique which can be introduced for solving the above mentioned threats. Based on the detection of the Watermark, the ownership and the integrity of the data can be asserted. Database Watermarking techniques are generally classified into two: i.e., Robust or Fragile. Robust watermarking techniques are designed for copyright protection and fragile watermarking techniques are for authentication or integrity checking of data. Watermarking schemes for relational databases authentication are almost fragile in nature. These algorithms do not allow any legitimate modification of the data. In most of the cases, innocent distortions such as tuple and/or attribute sorting may be considered as tampering. In this paper, the research work proposes a novel semi-fragile watermarking technique for tamper detection of relational databases. The new semi-fragile scheme can detect and localize malicious modifications, while allowing authorized updates. Theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate that common database attacks can be detected with high rate of success.

A secure image authentication scheme based on dual fragile watermark

Both security and tamper localization are essential for fragile watermarking techniques. Embedded fragile watermark should be sensitive enough to cover images. But high sensitivity maybe bring inaccurate tamper localization, and both high sensitivity and accurate tamper localization seem contradictory. This paper proposes a watermark scheme based on dual fragile watermark: diffusion watermark and authentication watermark. The diffusion watermark is determined by a cover image, a secret key and two random numbers via nonlinear transformations, and the authentication watermark is generated from the cover image, the diffusion watermark and another secret key. The diffusion watermark and the authentication watermark have high sensitivity to cover images and at meantime the authentication watermark can verify the integrity of images and localize tampered area. The scrambled authentication watermark and the diffusion watermark are arbitrarily embedded into the two lowest significant bit layers of the cover image through a random sequence controlled by a secret key. The design aims to enhance the security of fragile watermarking, and the statistical results and security analysis show that this scheme can resist chosen cover-image attacks.

A novel semi fragile watermarking technique for tamper detection and recovery using IWT and DCT

A novel semi fragile watermarking technique using integer wavelet transform (IWT) and discrete cosine transform (DCT) for tamper detection and recovery to enhance enterprise multimedia security is proposed. In this paper, two types of watermark are generated which are namely the authentication watermark and recovery Watermark. The Watermarked Image is formed by embedding the authentication watermark which is generated using the proposed IWT based authentication watermark generating Technique. Next, the watermarked image is divided into 2 × 2 blocks and a 10 bit recovery watermark is generated from each of the 2 × 2 blocks using the proposed DCT based recovery watermark generation technique. The generated recovery watermark is used to form the recovery tag which is sent along with the watermarked image to the receiver. At the receiver side, the proposed tamper detection technique is used for verifying the authenticity and identifying the attacks in the watermarked image. If the manipulations are identified as malicious, then the tampered parts in the received image are recovered using the proposed tamper recovery technique. The performance of the proposed tamper detection and recovery technique was tested for different types of incidental/content preserving manipulations and various types of malicious attacks. When compared to the existing semi fragile watermarking techniques, the proposed embedding technique produced a better PSNR (Peak Signal to noise ratio) for various watermarked images. Also, the proposed tamper detection and recovery technique were able to localize the malicious attacks and subsequently recover the tampered parts when compared to the existing techniques. The increased performance of the proposed tamper detection and recovery technique was due to the usage of both Normalized Hamming Similarity (NHS) and tamper detection map in the proposed tamper detection technique to identify manipulations and due to the generation of both the authentication and recovery watermark.

A DCT domain smart vicinity reliant fragile watermarking technique for DIBR 3D-TV

This work presents a vicinity reliant intelligent fragile watermarking scheme for depth image-based rendering technique used for three-dimensional television. Depth map of a centre image is implicitly inserted in the block-based discrete cosine transform (DCT) of the same using an aggregate, which also takes into account the presence of its neighbourhood blocks. Based upon the parity of a Boolean operation on the aggregate, parity is modulated which implicitly embeds the watermark. Genetic algorithm is then utilized to select the appropriate frequency bands in the DCT domain to become eligible for watermark embedding based on imperceptibility requirements. Experimental results demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed scheme in terms of its resistance against a set of fragile watermarking attacks and its ability to detect and localize tempering attempts.

A Feature-Based Fragile Watermarking of Color Image for Secure E-Government Restoration

this research developed a method using fragile watermarking technique for color images to achieve secure e-government tamper detection with recovery capability. Before performing the watermark insertion process, the RGB image is converted first into YCbCr image. The watermark component is selected from the image feature that approximates the original image, in which the chrominance value features as a watermark component. For a better detection process, 3-tuple watermark, check bits, parity bits, and recovery bits are selected. The average block in each 2 x 2 pixels is selected as 8 restoration bits of each component, the embedding process work on the pixels by modifying the pixels value of three Least Significant Bit (LSB) . The secret key for secure tamper detection and recovery, transmitted along with the watermarked image, and the algorithm mixture is used to extract information at the receiving end. The results show remarkably effective to restore tampered image.

A source coding scheme for authenticating audio signal with capability of self-recovery and anti-synchronization counterfeiting attack

Authenticating the veracity and integrity of digital media content is the most important application of fragile watermarking technique. Recently, fragile watermarking schemes for digital audio signals are developed to not only detect the malicious falsification, but also recover the tampered audio content. However, they are fragile against synchronization counterfeiting attack, which greatly narrows the applicability of audio watermarking schemes. In this paper, a novel source coding scheme for authenticating audio signal based on set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) encoding and chaotic dynamical system with capability of self-recovery and anti-synchronization counterfeiting attack is proposed. For self-recovery feature, the compressed version of audio signal generated by SPIHT source coding and protected against maliciously tampering by repeated coding is embedded into the original audio signal. Besides, for robustness against synchronization counterfeiting attack feature, based on the position and content of audio section, check bits are generated by Hash algorithm and chaotic sequence, and taken as part of fragile watermark. Simulation results show the self-embedding audio authentication scheme is recoverable with proper audio quality, and it has capability against synchronization counterfeiting attack.

An efficient watermarking technique for tamper detection and localization of medical images

With the exponential rise of multimedia technology and networked infrastructure, electronic healthcare is coming up a big way. One of the most important challenges in an electronic healthcare setup is the authentication of medical images, received by an expert at a far-off location from the sender. With an aim to address the critical authentication issue, this paper presents a fragile watermarking technique capable of tamper detection and localization in medical/general images. We divide the cover image into 4 × 4 non overlapping pixel blocks; with each block further sub-divided into two 4 × 2 blocks, called as Upper Half Block (UHB) and Lower Half Block (LHB). The information embedded in LHB facilitates tamper detection while as that embedded in UHB facilities tamper localization. The experimental results show that, in addition to tamper detection and localization capability, the proposed technique has lesser computational complexity when compared to other state-of-art techniques. Further, the proposed scheme results in average PSNR of 51.26 dB for a payload of one bit per pixel (1bpp) indicating that the watermarked images obtained are of high visual quality.

Fragile watermarking for copyright authentication and tamper detection of medical images using compressive sensing (CS) based encryption and contourlet domain processing

With the rapid growth in communication and computing technologies, transmission of digital images and medical images over the Internet is on the rise. In such scenario, there is a special need to meet the security and privacy issues and challenges of an individual and Intellectual Property (IP) owners. It is highly important for an individual to keep his/her personal images against invalid manipulation by the impostors. Hence developments of authentication and tamper detection techniques are the need of the hour. In this paper, a new hybrid non-blind fragile watermarking technique is proposed for tamper detection of images and for securing the copyrights of sensitive images. A combination of Compressive Sensing (CS) theory, Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), and Non-Subsampled Contourlet Transform (NSCT) are employed to achieve security, high embedding capacity, and authenticity. In this technique, the requirements are achieved by inserting encrypted watermark in lower frequency contourlet coefficients of cover images. The experimental results prove that this proposed technique provides high security, high imperceptibility, authenticity and tamper detection of various common signal processing and geometrical attacks.

Review of Some Existing Work for Self-Recovery Fragile Watermarking Algorithms

This paper covers brief study about some of the latest research trends in self-recovery fragile watermarking algorithms. Fragile watermarking techniques aim to detect modifications to images that are sensitive to any changes, which they are intolerant of even a one-bit alteration. It is desirable to be able to locate the modified areas when a portion of the original content is replaced with other information. Therefore, fragile watermarks are intended for checking the integrity and authenticity of digital contents. Self-recovery means that some significant feature obtained from a selected image itself as a watermark by modifying the pixel values of the original image (host). Once the picture is modified by other users, which has been inserted watermark can be used for tamper detection and recovery images. In this research, we have studied that generally, embedding algorithm for tamper recovery includes three main steps: preprocess the original image and extract important information from it, reorder and embed important information into spatial or frequency domain of host image, and extract the important information from stego-image and use it to recover damaged parts as tamper occurs.

Block Truncation Coding based effective watermarking scheme for image authentication with recovery capability

Due to the advancement of photo-editing software, powerful computers and high resolution capturing devices, it has become tough to prevent the digital image from tampering. So, in these days just by looking a digital image we cannot say whether it is a genuine or not. This is why digital image authentication, as well as restoration, has become the essential issues, especially when it is utilized in medical science, evidence of court, and forensic science. This paper proposes an effective self-embedding fragile watermarking technique for the digital image authentication as well as recovery. The watermark is generated by quantization, and block truncation coding (BTC) of each 2 × 2 non-overlapping block and embedded in three least significant bits (LSBs) of the corresponding mapped block. The recovery bits are derived from most significant bits (MSBs) of the host image, and the authentication bits are derived from recovery bits, the spatial location of pixels and watermark keys. Even if tempering rate is 50%, the reconstruction of tampered image is achieved with high peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and normalized correlation coefficient (NCC). The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme not only outperforms high-quality recovery fidelity but also negotiate the blocking artifacts additionally it improves the accuracy of tamper localization due to the use of very small size blocks.

Blind quality assessment of image and video based on fragile watermarking and robust features

Blind quality assessment is an important feature required by many modern multimedia communication systems. Reduced reference approaches employing fragile watermarking techniques have been proposed earlier for this purpose. This paper proposes an approach which makes use of robust image features and fragile watermarking techniques resulting in a reduced reference strategy. Other than the input image, the approach requires no external information. Robust image features are used to construct the watermark from the image to be transmitted, which is then embedded as a fragile watermark in the image itself. The same features are once again used to construct the reference watermark from the received image, with which the extracted fragile watermark is compared to determine the amount of degradation suffered by it. Construction of the watermark from the image itself, dispenses with the need for embedding an extraneous watermark which must be made known to the user separately. Singular Value Decomposition is used for the extraction of the fragile watermark from the received image while a different approach is used for reduced reference quality assessment of video sequences, making use of consecutive video frames. These form the significant contributions of the present work. The performances of the proposed algorithms have been demonstrated through extensive simulations using different kinds of gray-scale and color images and a number of popularly used test video sequences.

Reversible Watermarking for Enhancing the Security and Storage of ECG Signal and EPR in DICOM Images

Hospital information system and picture archiving and communication system allow transfer of medical images via internet for sharing studies, getting second opinion from radiologist and physician etc. Storage and transmission of Medical Images is crucial as huge volumes are generated every day. Security of medical images is of greater concern for its role in clinical diagnostics. Digital image watermarking is a proven technique that addresses the security and storage issues concerned. The objective is to improve the storage of medical data by applying a reversible watermarking technique. This work presents a semi fragile watermarking technique which hides Electronic patient record and Electrocardiogram Signal (ECG) in the medical image. Embedding is done in discrete wavelet domain followed by singular value decomposition. Recursive dither modulation is used to embed the watermark consisting of EPR, ECG signal, Hash of Region of interest (ROI), vertices of ROI and Doctor Identification code (DIC). Security is provided by encrypting the watermark using Advanced Encryption Standard before embedding. Performance of the scheme is evaluated on DICOM images in different modalities using Peak Signal to noise ratio (PSNR), Mean Structural Similarity Index (MSSIM) and Normalized Cross Correlation (NCC). PSNR and MSSIM values obtained are above 57dB and 0.98 for the proposed technique. NCC value of 0.98 is obtained showing the robustness of the watermark. Thus the proposed work presents a technique for storing EPR and ECG signal in medical image offering better visual quality and security when compared to other techniques of this type.

An imperceptible spatial domain color image watermarking scheme

The paper proposes a novel scheme for color image watermarking. Spatial domain techniques are used here for embedding the watermark information to generate high quality watermarked image. Spatial domain methods are popular with fragile watermarking techniques that mostly use two or three least significant image bits for storing the recovery information. Here spatial domain methods are further explored to develop a robust mechanism for copyright protection. The method presented gradually spreads the watermark information over a region of pixels as implemented by the transform domain techniques. Thus the method is designed to deliver the two essential features required of watermarking systems namely, high image quality and high robustness to attacks. Also after watermark embedding it is ensured that the alterations in one color component are well compensated and no color difference or variations is visually evident. For watermark embedding and color compensation two masks are proposed. The algorithm is experimentally analyzed using various quality metrics and watermark removal attacks. The results prove the model support imperceptible watermarking and high resilience to attacks.

SDAW: secure data aggregation watermarking-based scheme in homogeneous WSNs

Redundant data retransmission problem in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be eliminated using the data aggregation process which combines similar data to reduce the resource-consumption and consequently, saves energy during data transmission. In the recent days, many researchers have focused on securing this paradigm despite the constraints it imposes such as the limited resources. Most of the solutions proposed to secure the data aggregation process in WSNs are essentially based on the use of encryption keys to protect data during their transmission in the network. Indeed, the key generation and distribution mechanisms involve additional computation costs and consume more of energy. Considering this, in this paper, we propose a new security mechanism to secure data aggregation in WSNs called SDAW (secure data aggregation watermarking-based scheme in homogeneous WSNs). Our mechanism aims to secure the data aggregation process while saving energy. For this, the mechanism uses a lightweight fragile watermarking technique without encryption to insure the authentication and the integrity of the sensed data while saving the energy. The links between the sensor nodes and the aggregation nodes, and also the links between the aggregation nodes and the base station are secured by using the watermarking mechanism.

A Cross-Layer Watermarking-Based Mechanism for Data Aggregation Integrity in Heterogeneous WSNs

Ensuring data aggregation integrity introduces new challenges for data aggregation security protocols in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we propose an efficient watermarking based security strategy to ensure data aggregation integrity in heterogeneous WSNs. The proposed security scheme suggests a new fragile watermarking technique based on a dynamic embedding mechanism and a cross-layer approach. Compared to the existing heterogeneous security solutions, our system respects the resources limitations of the homogenous sensor nodes and optimizes the data aggregation process on the heterogeneous aggregation nodes. The proposal is evaluated using simulation.