Reversible Watermarking Method Research Articles

Arnold’s cat map secure multiple-layer reversible watermarking

Reversible watermarking is a novel approach to digital copyright protection that allows the embedding of watermarks into digital data using multiple layers while retaining the ability to recover the original content without data loss. This method provides a unique solution for securing digital data while maintaining the integrity and quality of the content. Nonetheless, new challenges have emerged with the increase in attacks on this method, as reversible watermarking methods lack security keys, making it easy to extract and modify hidden data. In this paper, we present a method for multiple-layer reversible watermarking with security keys, with the goal of addressing the challenges posed by attacks and improving data protection within embedded content. The method uses arnold’s cat map to scramble images, and data embedding in predetermined iterations serves as the methods security key. We put the method through its paces with six grayscale images. With this method, the embedding capacity can reach 2.999 bpp across four layers of embedding, while the visual image quality can reach 22.01 dB. The outcomes from this approach are that the security of multiple-layer reversible watermarking can be enhanced while preserving the capacity to embed data in each layer.

A semi-fragile reversible watermarking method based on qdft and tamper ranking

A semi-fragile reversible watermarking method based on qdft and tamper ranking

Two-Stage Robust Lossless DWI Watermarking Based on Transformer Networks in the Wavelet Domain

For copyright protection of diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) images, traditional robust watermarking techniques result in irreversible distortions, while reversible watermarking methods exhibit poor robustness. We propose a two-stage lossless watermarking algorithm based on a Transformer network to solve this problem. The first stage of the algorithm is to train the robust watermarking network, embed the watermark into the cover image in the wavelet domain, and design the frequency information enhancement module to improve the reconstruction quality. In the second stage, based on the pre-trained robust watermarking network, the difference image between the watermarked image and the cover image is reversibly embedded into the watermarked image as the compensation information to losslessly recover the cover image. The difference image is compressed using DCT and Huffman coding to reduce the compensation information. Finally, the watermark extraction network is trained on the second embedding result to avoid weakening the robustness of the first stage caused by the reversible embedding. The experimental results demonstrate that the PSNR of the watermarked image reaches 60.18 dB. Under various types of image attacks, the watermark extraction BER is below 0.003, indicating excellent robustness. The cover image can be recovered losslessly under no attack.

A Robust Data Hiding Reversible Technique for Improving the Security in e-Health Care System

The authenticity and integrity of healthcare is the primary objective. Numerous reversible watermarking schemes have been developed to improve the primary objective but increasing the quantity of embedding data leads to covering image distortion and visual quality resulting in data security detection. A trade-off between robustness, imperceptibility, and embedded capacity is difficult to achieve with current algorithms due to limitations in their ability. Keeping this purpose insight, an improved reversibility watermarking methodology is proposed to maximize data embedding capacity and imperceptibility while maintaining data security as a primary concern. A key is generated by a random path with minimum bit flipping is selected in the 4 × 4 block to gain access to the data embedding patterns. The random path’s complex structure ensures data security. Data of various sizes (8 KB, 16 KB, 32 KB) are used to analyze image imperceptibility and evaluate quality factors. The proposed reversible watermarking methodology performance is tested under standard structures PSNR, SSIM, and MSE. The results revealed that the MRI watermarked images are imperceptible, like the cover image when LSB is 3 bits plane. Our proposed reversible watermarking methodology outperforms other related techniques in terms of average PSNR (49.29). Experiment results show that the suggested reversible watermarking method improves data embedding capacity and imperceptibility compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches.

ENHANCING THE SECURITY AND INTEGRITY OF MEDICAL INFORMATION THROUGH WATER MARKING

Ongoing headways in another period of e- wellbeing and telemedicine advancements present more current open doors for sharing clinical information when an open correspondence station is utilized. Notwithstanding, this trade is confronting basic difficulties of copyright insurance, content validation, and respectability check. Hence, because of the popularity for safe control of patient's clinical data, computerized watermarking is expected, as a worth added instrument, for secure clinical information the executives. In this review, another reversible watermarking method for the security of clinical recordings is proposed. The patient personality is inserted, as a watermark, into the host clinical recordings. A calculation is embraced for choosing the ideal casings in every video shot. This approach incorporates the utilization of polynomial change strategies, to recognize the best watermark implanting regions in the ideal casings. Exploratory outcomes exhibit high subtlety of the watermark and solid vigor against various assaults. Thus, our calculation approves the safety efforts that guarantee a successful control of clinical recordings. Software Tools: Image processing Toolbox of MATLAB version 2016a Key Words: Watermarking, Biomedical imaging, Discrete wavelet transform,,PSNR

DFT-Based Reversible Watermarking Method for Image Ownership Protection

The Performance of Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT)-based watermarking methods has been carefully examined in the literature. Although the watermark in most of the literature was embedded in the DFT magnitudes using bit plane embedding, it was recently embedded in the Direct Current (DC) coefficient in the spatial domain. However, data loss due to rounding and replacement operations are still evident. Therefore, the objective of the method proposed here was to combine previous literature designs to implement a reversible DFT-based watermarking method for image ownership protection using bit plane embedding in the DC coefficient. The watermark was embedded in a middle bit plane of the DC coefficient for each DFT-transformed image block. In order to ensure reversibility and improve the security level, a combination of double Feynman and XOR gates was used to shuffle the watermark bits. The results revealed that the 8th (PSNR/SSIM = 32dB/0.8826), the 9th (PSNR/SSIM = 38dB/0.0.9587), and the 10th (PSNR/SSIM = 44dB/0.9917) bit planes for block sizes of 4×4, 8×8, and 16×16, respectively, were the best bit planes showing good imperceptibility and resistance to compression, filtering, and noise attacks. In conclusion, embedding the DC coefficients rather than all the magnitudes has influentially increased the watermarking robustness. In contrast, embedding the DC coefficients in the frequency domain rather than the spatial domain reduced the image’s structural contents distortion. Furthermore, the proposed method for grayscale images is effective in applications where reversibility is desired. However, further studies to find colored images’ reversible methods are recommended.

Reversible Watermarking Method with Low Distortion for the Secure Transmission of Medical Images

In telemedicine, the realization of reversible watermarking through information security is an emerging research field. However, adding watermarks hinders the distribution of pixels in the cover image because it creates distortions (which lead to an increase in the detection probability). In this article, we introduce a reversible watermarking method that can transmit medical images with minimal distortion and high security. The proposed method selects two adjacent gray pixels whose least significant bit (LSB) is different from the relevant message bit and then calculates the distortion degree. We use the LSB pairing method to embed the secret matrix of patient record into the cover image and exchange pixel values. Experimental results show that the designed method is robust to different attacks and has a high PSNR (peak signal-to-noise ratio) value. The MRI image quality and imperceptibility are verified by embedding a secret matrix of up to 262,688 bits to achieve an average PSNR of 51.657 dB. In addition, the proposed algorithm is tested against the latest technology on standard images, and it is found that the average PSNR of our proposed reversible watermarking technology is higher (i.e., 51.71 dB). Numerical results show that the algorithm can be extended to normal images and medical images.

Robust and reversible image watermarking in homomorphic encrypted domain

This paper proposes a robust and reversible watermarking scheme for the encrypted image by using Paillier cryptosystem. In the proposed method, the original image is divided into a number of non-overlapping blocks sized by 8 × 8 and Paillier cryptosystem is applied to encrypt the pixels in each block. Firstly, a data hider can calculate the statistical values of encrypted blocks by employing modular multiplicative inverse (MMI) method and looking for a mapping table. Then a watermark sequence can be embedded into the encrypted image by shifting the histogram of the statistical values. On the receiver side, the shifted histogram can be obtained from both the encrypted image and the decrypted image. Furthermore, the embedded watermark can be extracted from the shifted histogram. The encrypted original image can be restored by employing inverse operations of histogram shifting. This is followed by a decryption operation to restore the original image. In the proposed method, the hidden bits can still be extracted correctly under some typical content-preserving operations, such as JPEG/JPEG2000 compression and additive Gaussian noise. Compared with the previous reversible watermarking methods in plaintext domain, the proposed method has satisfactory performance in image quality and robustness. Experimental results have shown the validity of the proposed method.

Chaotic Reversible Watermarking Method Based on IWT with Tamper Detection for Transferring Electronic Health Record

Health IoT deals with sensitive medical information of patients, therefore security concerns need to be addressed. Confidentiality of Electronic Health Record (EHR) and privacy are two important security requirements for IoT based healthcare systems. Recently, watermarking algorithms as an efficient response to these requirements is in the spotlight. Further, as smart city-based applications have to react to real-time situations, efficient computation is a demand for them. In this paper, a secure, lightweight, reversible, and high capacity watermarking algorithm with tamper detection capability is proposed for IoT based healthcare systems. The scheme has applied Integer Wavelet Transform (IWT) and chaotic map for efficiency and increasing security. EHR is encrypted and then embedded into the Least Significant Bits (LSB) of wavelet coefficients of medical images. The proposed method has been extensively tested for various color and grayscale commonly used medical and general images. Investigations on experimental results and criterions such as Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Bit Error Ratio (BER) above 45.41 dB and 0.04, respectively, for payload of 432,538 bits indicate that the proposed method, besides providing security, being reversible, tamper detection capability, and high embedding capacity, has high imperceptibility and adequate resistance against different types of attacks.

Survey on Reversible Watermarking Techniques of Echocardiography

In critical domains such as medical and military, reversible watermarking (RW) has been used. In the medical domain, different modalities are used to store patient information. The current study focuses on the application of RW in echocardiography data. Mostly, RW is applied to protect patient data without affecting the quality of the decoded image. The RW methods are benchmarked as per imperceptibility, robustness, and payload. The survey presents a comparison of state-of-the-art RW techniques. The imperceptibility and payload are balanced through a tradeoff. It has been observed in the literature that most of the RW methods lack robustness, and very small-scale robustness has been achieved in this domain of watermarking. Different types of RW, i.e., fragile, semifragile, and robust methods, are being compared and reviewed. Mostly, fragile methods are developed on the error-expansion techniques built on histogram shifting-based approach. In this study, several RW methods are compared and the results are presented.

A New Reversible Database Watermarking Approach with Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm

In many fields such as medicine, science, transportation, it is often necessary to maintain the real-time information, and the data in the centralized database that saves data in these fields is distributed to various clients. On the insecure public Internet, there are distributed databases stored in data centers. Sharing may create risks, such as unauthorized copies, changes to data, and distribution of data to unauthorized persons for reuse. Many database watermarking methods have been proposed to protect digital rights. In order to reduce watermark distortion and increase watermark capacity, people pay more and more attention to the optimization of watermark technology. This paper proposes a method of embedding differential expansion watermarking (DEW) based on ant colony algorithm (ACO) in relational database. This method uses a secure hash algorithm for grouping, increasing the privacy of watermark embedding. The ant colony algorithm performs the optimization operation, finds the best attribute columns for embedding the watermark in the subgroup, and finally uses the differential expansion technology to embed the watermark. Experimental results show that compared with similar works reported in the literature, the reversible watermarking method based on ant colony algorithm database proposed in this paper not only increases the watermarking capacity, but also improves the robustness against various types of attacks.

A New Robust Approach for Reversible Database Watermarking with Distortion Control

Nowadays information is crucial in many fields such as medicine, science and business, where databases are used effectively for information sharing. However, the databases face the risk of being pirated, stolen or misused, which may result in a lot of security threats concerning ownership rights, data tampering and privacy protection. Watermarking is utilized to enforce ownership rights on shared relational databases. Many reversible watermarking methods are proposed recently to protect rights of owners along with recovering original data. Most state-of-the-art methods modify the original data to a large extent, result in data quality degradation, and cannot achieve good balance between robustness against malicious attacks and data recovery. In this paper, we propose a robust and reversible database watermarking technique, Genetic Algorithm and Histogram Shifting Watermarking (GAHSW), for numerical relational database. The genetic algorithm is used to select the best secret key for grouping database, where the watermarking can be embedded with balanced distortion and capacity. The histogram of the prediction error is shifted to embed the watermark with good robustness. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of GAHSW and show that it outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of robustness against malicious attacks and preservation of data quality.

Rich-information reversible watermarking scheme of vector maps

With the increasing rampant infringements of vector maps, rich-information watermarking technology is being more and more essential for forceful copyright declaration. Most of the existing watermarking algorithms of vector maps, however, cannot embed abundant copyright information. In this paper, a rich-information and reversible watermarking scheme is proposed for vector maps based on the ideas of compression coding of watermarking image and decimal-hex conversion of vertex coordinates. It recodes the original watermarking image to shorten the length of the final watermark data and groups map vertices to choose cover data for watermark embedding. And the reversible embedding is then carried out by modifying the polar coordinates of map vertices. While the proposed compression coding method of watermarking image and the decimal-hex conversion of map vertices guarantee the embedding of rich-information watermark data, the reversible watermarking method provides recovery of the original map content. Comprehensive experimental results show that the proposed scheme is suitable for vector map applications where abundant copyright information is required while the number of map vertices is limited.

A Novel Robust Reversible Watermarking Scheme for Protecting Authenticity and Integrity of Medical Images

It is of great importance in telemedicine to protect authenticity and integrity of medical images. They are mainly addressed by two technologies, which are region of interest (ROI) lossless watermarking and reversible watermarking. However, the former causes biases on diagnosis by distorting region of none interest (RONI) and introduces security risks by segmenting image spatially for watermark embedding. The latter fails to provide reliable recovery function for the tampered areas when protecting image integrity. To address these issues, a novel robust reversible watermarking scheme is proposed in this paper. In our scheme, a reversible watermarking method is designed based on recursive dither modulation (RDM) to avoid biases on diagnosis. In addition, RDM is combined with Slantlet transform and singular value decomposition to provide a reliable solution for protecting image authenticity. Moreover, ROI and RONI are divided for watermark generation to design an effective recovery function under limited embedding capacity. Finally, watermarks are embedded into whole medical images to avoid the risks caused by segmenting image spatially. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed lossless scheme not only has remarkable imperceptibility and sufficient robustness, but also provides reliable authentication, tamper detection, localization and recovery functions, which outperforms existing schemes for protecting medical images

Encrypted separable reversible watermarking with authentication and error correction

Reversible Watermarking (RW) in encrypted images helps to reconstruct the original content and embedded data without distortion while protecting the owner’s privacy. The security and integrity of embedded data is very much demanding. In this paper, an efficient RW method is proposed that recovers the embedded data from the marked encrypted color palette images in the presence of attacks. In this method, embeddable color-triples are constructed by employing color partitioning. Next, the cryptographic SHA-256 hash and Bose–Chaudhuri–Hocquenghem (BCH) are applied over the secret information to ensure the authenticity and integrity. The hash authenticated secret data is embedded into the encrypted color palette image. The secret data is extracted using the separable color partitioning method and authenticated with cryptographic hash function. The proposed method has higher embedding capacity when compared to other relative schemes. The BCH codes helps to recover the secret data and cover image in the presence of noise and attacks.

Hardware implementation of adaptive feedback based reversible image watermarking for image processing application

This paper presents a reversible image watermarking (RIW) method including an adaptive feedback part based on difference expansion (DE). With respect to some parameters of the image, peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), the highest payload capacity and the corresponding embedding threshold are spontaneously calculated by using the proposed adaptive feedback-based reversible Image watermarking (AFRIW). The payload capacity for data embedding is briefly explained. The machinery part of the adaptive feedback for controlling the payload capacity is presented. Software verification of three cover images is presented. Based on some image parameters, the comparative result between the proposed AFRIW algorithm and DE-based RIW method is presented. This paper also presents the VLSI architecture of this proposed algorithm for RIW. The proposed architecture has been implemented using VIVADO 2016.2 based on Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA and Zynq device platforms. The software implementation results clearly demonstrated that the AFRIW method provides higher PSNR than the DE-based RIW method. The hardware implementation results indicate that the proposed algorithm has low timing complexity over other existing feedback based RIW algorithms which in turn provide higher speed.

A robust reversible image watermarking scheme in DCT domain using Arnold scrambling and histogram modification

Among the various watermarking schemes, the reversible watermarking scheme has drawn extensive attention in the recent years for its application in sensitive issues like medical, military and typical law-enforcement images. Cover image dependent embedding capacity and lack of robustness are the most crucial concerns of the reversible watermarking methods. To overcome these issues, a discrete cosine transform (DCT) and histogram shifting based robust reversible image watermarking scheme using Arnold scrambling is presented in this paper. Initially, the image is decomposed into non-overlapping blocks and consequently DCT are applied to each block to embed a binary bit of watermark into each transformed block by modifying one pair of middle significant AC coefficients. In this initial step, location map is also generated for the cover image restoration purpose in the extracting side. Then, this location map is embedded in the cover image using histogram modification technique. In the receiver side, at first location map is generated from an image using histogram modification method and watermark is recovered from the corresponding image. Using location map reversible image is reversed in the following extracting phase of the proposed method. The proposed reversible watermarking scheme has also been experimented to verify the robustness property against several image processing attacks and satisfactory results are achieved.

A robust reversible image watermarking scheme in DCT domain using Arnold scrambling and histogram modification

Among the various watermarking schemes, the reversible watermarking scheme has drawn extensive attention in the recent years for its application in sensitive issues like medical, military and typical law-enforcement images. Cover image dependent embedding capacity and lack of robustness are the most crucial concerns of the reversible watermarking methods. To overcome these issues, a discrete cosine transform (DCT) and histogram shifting based robust reversible image watermarking scheme using Arnold scrambling is presented in this paper. Initially, the image is decomposed into non-overlapping blocks and consequently DCT are applied to each block to embed a binary bit of watermark into each transformed block by modifying one pair of middle significant AC coefficients. In this initial step, location map is also generated for the cover image restoration purpose in the extracting side. Then, this location map is embedded in the cover image using histogram modification technique. In the receiver side, at first location map is generated from an image using histogram modification method and watermark is recovered from the corresponding image. Using location map reversible image is reversed in the following extracting phase of the proposed method. The proposed reversible watermarking scheme has also been experimented to verify the robustness property against several image processing attacks and satisfactory results are achieved.

A reversible watermarking for authenticating 2D CAD engineering graphics based on iterative embedding and virtual coordinates

Aim to authenticate the integrity of 2D CAD engineering graphics, a reversible watermarking method based on iterative embedding and virtual coordinates is proposed. For each vertex in 2D CAD engineering graphics, two neighboring virtual coordinates are generated to form an embedding data unit, which is good for the improvement of the correlation of them. Meanwhile, iterative embedding policy is implemented to enhance the capacity. Experimental results and analysis show that it is strictly reversible, and the capacity is positive proportion to the embedding times. Meanwhile, the distortion can be well controlled in a small range, and it is robust against translation and scaling. It has potential application in the integrity protection of 2D CAD engineering graphics with low correlation and high data precision requirements.

A new reversible watermarking method based on histogram shifting

A new reversible watermarking method based on histogram shifting