Geometric Attacks Research Articles

Geometrically Invariant NSCT–GPCET-Based Image Watermarking with Accurate Moment Calculation

Generic polar complex exponential transform (GPCET), as continuous orthogonal moment, has the advantages of computational simplicity, numerical stability, and resistance to geometric transforms, which make it suitable for watermarking. However, errors in kernel function discretization can degrade these advantages. To maximize the GPCET utilization in robust watermarking, this paper proposes a secondary grid-division (SGD)-based moment calculation method that divides each grid corresponding to one pixel into nonoverlapping subgrids and increases the number of sampling points. Using the accurate moment calculation method, a nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT)–GPCET-based watermarking scheme with resistance to image processing and geometrical attacks is proposed. In this scheme, the accurate moment calculation can reduce the numerical error and geometrical error of the traditional methods, which is verified by an image reconstruction comparison. Additionally, NSCT and accurate GPCET are utilized to achieve watermark stability. Subsequent experiments test the proposed watermarking scheme for its invisibility and robustness, and verify that the robustness of the proposed scheme outperforms that of other schemes when its level of invisibility is significantly higher.

Geometric resistant polar quaternion discrete Fourier transform and its application in color image zero-hiding

As a typical frequency-domain analysis method, quaternion discrete Fourier transform (QDFT) has been widely used in information hiding in color images. However, due to the sensitivity of QDFT to geometric attacks, existing QDFT-based information hiding schemes have limited ability in resisting geometric attacks. In this study, a kind of novel geometrically resilient polar QDFT (PQDFT) is constructed and the properties of the proposed PQDFT are analyzed. Subsequently, a PQDFT-based color image zero-hiding scheme robust to geometric attacks is proposed for lossless copyright protection of color images, which experimentally shows reasonable resistance against geometric and common attacks, indicating better robustness compared with the existing QDFT-based information hiding schemes and other leading-edge zero-hiding schemes.

Novel quaternion polar complex exponential transform and its application in color image zero-watermarking

The robust watermarking method embeds the information in the image to protect the copyright. The embedding process will destroy the original image and cannot be effectively applied to the images used in the medicine and military with high integrity demand. A robust zero-watermarking algorithm for lossless copyright protection of color images without changing the original image was proposed in this paper. A novel quaternion polar complex exponential transform (NoQPCET) was firstly constructed with effectively improved performance; then the NoQPCET and chaotic system based robust color image zero-watermarking algorithm was suggested for lossless copyright protection of color images. In the proposed algorithm, the robustness against geometric attacks was enhanced due to the excellent geometric invariance of NoQPCET, and the security was also improved because of the initial value sensitivity of the chaotic system. Experimental results showed that this algorithm had very strong robustness against both geometric attacks and common image processing attacks, and was superior to other algorithms.

A fast technique to detect copy-move image forgery with reflection and non-affine transformation attacks

Copy-move forgery is one of the most frequently utilized image tampering technique which uses the segment of the same image to produce manipulated image by duplicating or concealing image regions. To remove suspicious traces of forgery, various attacks are applied over the tampered image which make forgery detection process too complicated. We propose a forgery detection technique in which Center Surround Extrema (CenSurE) detector is applied for keypoint detection from images. To compute keypoint descriptors, Local Image Permutation Interval Descriptor (LIPID) is used. Keypoint matching is performed using k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) technique with utilization of k-d tree and Best-Bin-First (BBF) search method. Grouping over keypoints is performed using Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) clustering. We apply Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC) algorithm to remove outliers obtained during forgery detection process. Experimental results show that proposed technique can effectively detect forged images containing reflection and non-affine transformation with geometrical attacks. In addition, proposed approach also shows robustness against erosion, dilation, RGB color addition, zoom motion blur, JPEG compression, spread noise addition, and multiple copy-move attacks. Proposed scheme consumes least time in forgery detection as compared to state-of-the-art methods.

A Zero-Watermark Hybrid Algorithm for Remote Sensing Images Based on DCT and DFT

Remote sensing image has significant advantages such as large detection range and fast acquisition speed, so it has been used in military, environmental, meteorological and other fields. In order to improve the robustness of the digital watermarking technology on the premise that the remote sensing image information is not modified, a remote sensing image zero watermarking algorithm based on Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) is proposed in this paper. First of all, the color remote sensing image is converted into grayscale image. The transformed coefficient matrix is obtained by DFT, to the grayed host image. Secondly, in order to compress the amount of information and improve the efficiency of the algorithm, the high frequency coefficient image is transformed by DCT transform. The low frequency coefficient image which is consistent with the size of the watermark image after DCT is selected as the feature image of the host image. After that, the watermark information is scrambled by Arnold transform to improve the security of the watermark information. Finally, the zero-watermark image is obtained by XOR operation between the scrambled watermark information and the feature image. The zero-watermark image is saved in a third-party database for copyright verification. In order to verify the robustness of digital watermarking, this paper carries out sharpening, histogram equalization, Karma transform, noise, filtering and geometric attacks on the host image, and compares it with other algorithms. The NC value between the extracted watermark image and the original watermark image after attacking the host image show that the algorithm has a strong ability to resist common attacks.

A Watermarking Scheme for Color Image Using Quaternion Discrete Fourier Transform and Tensor Decomposition

To protect the copyright of the color image, a color image watermarking scheme based on quaternion discrete Fourier transform (QDFT) and tensor decomposition (TD) is presented. Specifically, the cover image is partitioned into non-overlapping blocks, and then QDFT is performed on each image block. Then, the three imaginary frequency components of QDFT are used to construct a third-order tensor. The third-order tensor is decomposed by Tucker decomposition and generates a core tensor. Finally, an improved odd–even quantization technique is employed to embed a watermark in the core tensor. Moreover, pseudo-Zernike moments and multiple output least squares support vector regression (MLS–SVR) network model are used for geometric distortion correction in the watermark extraction stage. The scheme utilizes the inherent correlations among the three RGB channels of a color image, and spreads the watermark into the three channels. The experimental results indicate that the proposed scheme has better fidelity and stronger robustness for common image-processing and geometric attacks, can effectively resist each color channel exchange attack. Compared with the existing schemes, the presented scheme achieves better performance.

A robust zero-watermarking algorithm for lossless copyright protection of medical images

The continuous orthogonal moments of images have become a main tool used in zero-watermarking algorithms in recent years. However, there is a problem that should not be neglected for existing zero-watermarking algorithms, which is known as numerical instability. Because the continuous orthogonal moments used in existing zero-watermarking algorithms are integer-order moments, this problem affects the computational accuracy of such moments and thus affects the performance of zero-watermarking algorithms. Therefore, in this paper, the integer-order radial harmonic Fourier moments (IoRHFMs) are firstly extended to fractional-order radial harmonic Fourier moments (FoRHFMs) to effectively mitigate the problem of numerical instability and improve the computational accuracy of IoRHFMs, and then a FoRHFM-based zero-watermarking algorithm for medical images is proposed to achieve lossless copyright protection of medical images. The experimental results show that this algorithm is highly robust to geometric attacks and common attacks, and is superior to IoRHFM-based and other zero-watermarking algorithms.

A Reversible Watermarking System for Medical Color Images: Balancing Capacity, Imperceptibility, and Robustness

The authenticity and integrity of medical images in telemedicine has to be protected. Robust reversible watermarking (RRW) algorithms provide copyright protection and the original images can be recovered at the receiver’s end. However, the existing algorithms have limitations in their ability to balance the tradeoff among robustness, imperceptibility, and embedded capacity. Some of them are even not completely reversible. Besides, most medical image watermarking algorithms are not designed for color images. To improve their performance in protecting medical color image information, we propose a novel RRW scheme based on the discrete wavelet transform (DWT). First, the DWT provides a robust solution. Second, the modification of the wavelet domain coefficient guarantees the changes of integer values in the spatial domain and ensures the reversibility of the watermarking scheme. Third, the embedding scheme makes full use of the characteristics of the original image and watermarking. This reduces the modification of the original image and ensures better imperceptibility. Lastly, the selection of the Zernike moments order for geometric correction is optimized to predict attack parameters more accurately by using less information. This enhances the robustness of the proposed scheme against geometric attacks such as rotation and scaling. The proposed scheme is robust against common and geometric attacks and has a high embedding capacity without obvious distortion of the image. The paper contributes towards improving the security of medical images in remote healthcare.

A blind color digital image watermarking method based on image correction and eigenvalue decomposition

With the rapid development of Internet technology, the copyright protection of color images has become more and more important. In order to fulfill this purpose, this paper designs a blind color digital image watermarking method based on image correction and eigenvalue decomposition (EVD). Firstly, all the eigenvalues of the pixel block in the color host image are obtained by EVD. Then, the sum of the absolute value of the eigenvalues is quantified by the variable quantization steps to embed the color watermark image that encrypted by affine transform and encoded by the Hamming code. If the watermarked image is processed by geometric attack, then the attacked image can be corrected by using the geometric attributes. Finally, the inverse embedding process is performed to extract the color watermark. Moreover, the advantages of the proposed method are shown as follows: (1) all Peak Signal-to-noise Ratio (PSNR) values are greater than 42 dB; (2) the average Structural Similarity Index Metric (SSIM) values are greater than 0.97; (3) the maximum embedded capacity is 0.25bpp; (4) whole running-time is less than 20 s; (5) the key space is more than 2450; (6) most Normalized Cross-correlation (NC) values are more than 0.9. Compared with the related methods, the experimental results show that the proposed method not only has better watermark invisibility and larger watermark capacity, but also has higher security and stronger robustness against geometric attacks.

New robust method for image copyright protection using histogram features and Sine Cosine Algorithm

Zero-watermarking methods are widely used for efficient copyright protection of digital images. These methods have the ability to withstand both common image processing attacks and some geometric attacks. However, they cannot effectively resist the complex image attacks such as translation, cropping, combined geometric attacks, UnZign, etc. For this purpose, we propose in this work a novel robust zero-watermarking method that can effectively resist several complex image attacks. The proposed method involves the use of the histogram descriptor to generate a secret sequence of binary values from a user-selected Region of Interest (ROI). In order to check the intellectual property rights, the Sine Cosine Algorithm (SCA) is used for detecting the ROI in the attacked image. Then, the computed histogram of this ROI is binarized with a secret method. Next, the resulting sequence of binary values is compared to the original one generated from the original ROI. If there is a high similarity between these binary sequences, the grayscale image copyrights are validated. The simulation results show that the proposed method is not only resistant to geometric attacks (rotation, scaling) and to common image attacks (JPEG compression, filtering, etc.), but it is also robust against the most complex image attacks (cropping, translation, combined geometric attacks, etc.). Furthermore, the results of the comparisons carried out in terms of robustness against different types of attacks prove the superiority of our method over other similar recent zero-watermarking methods.

Compressive Sensing Theory for Improving the Robustness and the Security of the Discrete Wavelet Transform-Singular Value Decomposition Watermarking Scheme

Digital watermarking has been suggested as a solution to protect copyright and ownership of digital images. The effective watermarking scheme should satisfy imperceptibility, robustness, capacity and security requirements. In this research, the security issue and the lack of reconstruction quality of the watermark logo of the integration of Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and Compressive Sensing (CS) watermark technique are addressed. Wilkinson measurement matrix is proposed to increase the robustness and improve the reconstruction quality of the watermark logo in the DWT and SVD based on the CS watermarking scheme. Additionally, the security issue of the SVD is solved by sending a scrambled compressed logo then extracting U, V matrices from this compressed logo at the decoder. The proposed method not only increases security but also reduces the size of the transmitted watermark logo. The robustness of the proposed algorithm is evaluated in the presence of different attacks like signal processing, compression, geometrical and noise attacks. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed technique is more robust than the conventional techniques for all attacks, as well as its robust security. Moreover, the quality of the watermarked image is measured and the results show that the imaging performance of the proposed technique is approximately 0.7 to 4 dB better than that of the conventional methods. Consequently, the proposed watermarking scheme proves its ability to achieve the demands of security, imperceptibility and robustness against different attacks.

A Robust Watermarking Scheme based on Delaunay Image Reconstruction Robust to Affine Transformation

This paper proposes a sub-channel image reconstruction algorithm based on Delaunay triangle. First, according to the different sensitivity of the human eye to the three color channels, different channels are used to avoid the influence of watermark embedding on pixels around the feature points. Then, feature points should be selected on the selected channel to make them have sufficient robustness. At this time, the location of the feature points extracted on the corresponding channel can be used as the watermark embedding position. Finally, considering the influence of geometric attacks such as affine transformation, this paper proposes a reconstruction algorithm based on Delaunay triangle, which uses feature point information to reconstruct the image before the watermark extraction, and extract the watermark on the reconstructed image. The effect of watermark extraction has been improved.

Research on watermark printing technology of STL model based on Menger curvature

In order to solve the data protection problem of STL model, this paper proposes a 3D printing watermarking method based on Menger curvature and K-means clustering algorithm. By comparing the research contents of 3D mesh model watermarking algorithm and two 3D printing watermarking methods, the 3D printing watermarking method is applied based on Menger curvature and K-means clustering algorithm. The method flow, watermark embedding and watermark extraction are discussed. Finally, the experimental results show that this method can not only improve the invisibility of model watermark, but also be robust to geometric attacks such as rotation, scaling and translation.

Robust zero-watermarking scheme based on novel quaternion radial fractional Charlier moments

In this paper, we propose a zero-watermarking scheme based on a new set of quaternion moments called Quaternion Radial Fractional Charlier Moments (QRFrCMs) for the copyright protection of color medical images. The proposed moments are developed from a new type of discrete orthogonal polynomials called Fractional Charlier Polynomials (FrCPs) and from quaternion theory. The robustness of the proposed scheme is ensured thanks to robustness of the proposed quaternion moments against image processing attacks and geometric attacks where the BCR is greater than 98%. In addition, the scheme uses the fractional order of QRFrCMs and a chaotic system based on two-dimensional CML (2DCML) using mixed linear-nonlinear coupling to provide a high level of security. Experimental results show the superiority of the proposed scheme over other recent schemes in terms of robustness against geometric attacks and common image processing attacks. The proposed scheme can be used for the secure transmission of color medical images over insecure networks.

A Polar Complex Exponential Transform-Based Zero-Watermarking for Multiple Medical Images with High Discrimination

Zero-watermarking is one of the solutions for image copyright protection without tampering with images, and thus it is suitable for medical images, which commonly do not allow any distortion. Moment-based zero-watermarking is robust against both image processing and geometric attacks, but the discrimination of watermarks is often ignored by researchers, resulting in the high possibility that host images and fake host images cannot be distinguished by verifier. To this end, this paper proposes a PCET- (polar complex exponential transform-) based zero-watermarking scheme based on the stability of the relationships between moment magnitudes of the same order and stability of the relationships between moment magnitudes of the same repetition, which can handle multiple medical images simultaneously. The scheme first calculates the PCET moment magnitudes for each image in an image group. Then, the magnitudes of the same order and the magnitudes of the same repetition are compared to obtain the content-related features. All the image features are added together to obtain the features for the image group. Finally, the scheme extracts a robust feature vector with the chaos system and takes the bitwise XOR of the robust feature and a scrambled watermark to generate a zero-watermark. The scheme produces robust features with both resistance to various attacks and low similarity among different images. In addition, the one-to-many mapping between magnitudes and robust feature bits reduces the number of moments involved, which not only reduces the computation time but also further improves the robustness. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme meets the performance requirements of zero-watermarking on the robustness, discrimination, and capacity, and it outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of robustness, discrimination, and computational time under the same payloads.

Color Image Zero-Watermarking Using Accurate Quaternion Generalized Orthogonal Fourier–Mellin Moments

In recent years, digital image zero-watermarking algorithm has made great progress. But there are still some problems. First, most algorithms only focus on robustness and ignore discrimination. Second, most methods have good robustness against conventional signal attacks but poor robustness against geometric attacks. Thirdly, most of the existing zero-watermarking algorithms only focus on gray-scale images, and there are relatively few researches on color images. In order to cope with these issues, this paper introduces a novel color image zero-watermarking scheme using accurate quaternion generalized orthogonal Fourier–Mellin moments (AQGOFMMs). In the first stage of the proposed method, accurate computation of generalized orthogonal Fourier–Mellin moments (GOFMMs) based on the polar pixel tiling scheme. In the next stage, the high-precision GOFMMs are extended to the accurate quaternion GOFMMs (AQGOFMMs). Finally, the immutable set of features is extracted to construct a zero-watermark. It is worth mentioning that, different from the traditional way of constructing watermark with the amplitude of moments, this algorithm uses the full 4-D features of AQGOFMMs to construct watermark. The experiment proved that proposed zero-watermarking scheme gives a good balance between discriminability and robustness. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm achieves better performance than the other existing zero-watermarking.

MEDICAL IMAGES WATERMARKING SCHEMES-A REVIEW

As a result of internet expansion, the popularity of sharing medical documents between specialists in different medical institutes and hospitals has increased. Accordingly, protecting the transmitted patient's data against any modification or accessing from unauthorized people is a must. One of the popular solutions for protecting patient's data against tampers like copy-past, text addition and content removal and various geometric attacks like crop, rotate and resize and signal attacks like histogram equalization, Gaussian noise, median filter, and sharpening is watermarking techniques. Watermarking techniques can be classified according to many perspectives like Robustness, Human Perceptivity, Task Performed, Domain Type, Extraction Process and Secret Keys. Medical image can be in the spatial domain and transform domain. This paper presents a review of recent watermarking techniques of medical images and a comparison between various types of transform domains and the different purposes of medical images’ watermark. A proposed scheme is presented in this paper.

A robust digital watermarking method for depth-image-based rendering 3D video

Depth-image-based rendering (DIBR) has become an accessible rendering technology for 3D video. A variety of digital watermarking methods have been proposed to protect the copyright of DIBR 3D video works. However, the robustness and imperceptibility of the existing methods need to be improved. Therefore, we apply the DIBR rendering features to propose a watermarking method to enhance the watermarking effect. First, to improve the robustness, we combine the DIBR rendering rules to construct steady feature data as the selection criterion of watermark embedding position. We detect the scale invariable feature transformation (SIFT) feature points from centre views and match them in every two adjacent views. Each two matched feature points construct one matching vector. The gradient-probability distributions of the vectors are used as the feature data to determine the watermark embedding position. Thus, the embedding positions are robust to the affine transformation and geometric attacks, and the watermark robustness improved. Second, to improve the imperceptibility, we design a joint watermark extraction strategy based on the similarity of the rendered left and right images. The watermark data are embedded into the centre view with low embedding strength and jointly extracted from the left and right images. This strategy guarantees the extraction accuracy while reducing the impact of watermark embedding on the original centre view. Experimental data show that the proposed method has good robustness and imperceptibility.

Enhancing Feature Point‐Based Video Watermarking against Geometric Attacks with Template

As the Internet and communication technologies have developed quickly, the spread and usage of online video content have become easier, which results in major infringement problems. While video watermarking may be a viable solution for digital video content copyright protection, overcoming geometric attacks is a significant challenge. Although feature point‐based watermarking algorithms are expected to be very resistant to these attacks, they are sensitive to feature region localization errors, resulting in poor watermark extraction accuracy. To solve this issue, we introduce the template to enhance the location accuracy of feature point‐based watermarking. Furthermore, a scene change‐based frame allocation method is presented, which arranges the template and the watermark to be embedded into different frames and eliminates their mutual interference, enhancing the performance of the proposed algorithm. According to the experimental results, our algorithm outperforms state‐of‐the‐art methods in terms of robustness against geometric attacks under close imperceptibility.

A fusion-domain color image watermarking based on Haar transform and image correction

The leapfrog development of computer technology has greatly enhanced the breadth of information dissemination. As a larger information carrier, color image becomes more and more popular, but the copyright protection problem becomes more and more serious. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a fusion-domain color watermarking based on Haar transform and image correction. Firstly, the maximum energy coefficient of Haar transform is directly obtained in spatial domain. Then, the coefficient is quantified with the help of variable quantization steps to embed the color watermark that encrypted by affine transform. If the watermarked image is processed by geometric attack, then the attacked image can be corrected by using of the geometric properties. Finally, the inverse embedding process is performed to extract the watermark. The performances of the proposed method are shown as follows: 1) all PSNR (Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio) values are greater than 40 dB; 2) all SSIM (Structural Similarity Index Metric) values are greater than 0.96; 3) most NC (Normalized Cross-correlation) values are more than 0.9; 4) the key space is more than 2432; 5) the maximum embedded capacity is 0.25bpp; 6) the running time is about 6 s. Compared with the related methods, the experimental results show that the proposed method is feasible and has good performance.