Secure Watermarking Technique Research Articles

Implementation of Robust and Secure Watermarking Algorithm on FPGA using DCT

Digital watermarking deals with embedding digital content in a cover signal so that it becomes indiscernible to make it robust against different security threats. This work demonstrates the implementation of a robust and secure watermarking technique on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) using Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). Block by block DCT of the cover image was computed and watermark pixels in each of the blocks were hidden using middle-frequency band coefficients. Security is ensured by encrypting the watermarkwith a secret key and Arnold transform. The resultant watermark image is robust to various threats like JPEG compression, scaling, cropping, and noise attacks. This watermarking approach requires a large amount of data to be processed at high speed. FPGA is the best choice for such an application. Also, it is reprogrammable and easily upgradable according to user application. In this work, a watermarking algorithm is implemented using Xilinx design tools on the Artix-7 FPGA board.

Iris Image Watermarking Technique for Security and Manipulation Reveal

Providing security while storing or sharing iris images has been considered as an interesting research topic and accordingly different iris image watermarking techniques have been presented. Most of the available techniques have been presented to ensure the attachment of the secret data to their related iris images or to hide a logo which can be used for copyright purposes. The previous security techniques can successfully meet their aims; however, they cannot reveal the manipulations in the iris region. This paper presents an iris image watermarking technique that can provide security and reveal manipulations in the iris region. At the sender side, the proposed technique divides the image into two regions (i.e., iris region and non-iris region) and generates the manipulation reveal data from the iris region then embeds it in the non-iris region. At the receiver side, the secret data is extracted from the non-iris region and compared with calculated data from the iris region to reveal manipulations if exist. Different experiments have been conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed technique which proved its efficiency not only in providing security but also in revealing any manipulations in the iris region.

Encryption based Watermarking Technique for Security of Medical Image

This paper proposes an encryption-based image watermarking scheme for medical images using a customized quantization of wavelet coefficient and a crypto system based on the chaotic cipher of Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). In order to spread the robustness of our algorithm and provide extra security, an improved SVD-CHAOS embedding and extraction procedure has been used to scramble the watermark logo in the preprocessing step of the proposed method. In the process of watermark embedding, an R-level discrete wavelet transform was applied to the host image. The high frequency wavelet coefficients are selected to carry these scrambled-watermarks by using adaptive quantization low bit modulation (LBM). The proposed image watermarking method endures entirety attacks and rightly extracts the hidden watermark without significant degradation in the image quality, Thus, when the Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Normalized Correlation (NC) performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with other related techniques.

A discrete wavelet transform-based audio watermarking technique for digital security

This work proposes a model using discrete wavelet transform (DWT) to eliminate the attacks on digital security. Semi-fragile watermarking techniques strive towards establishing the confidentiality of data content. Minutiae algorithm finds its application in various fields to safeguard and protect the data content ensuring integrity of data security, authenticity, copyright proofs and data ownership. This work is based on the usage of the combined technique of employing the minutiae algorithm along with DWT for the secured retrieval of audio data to protect network security. Experimental results are shown for the proposed technique based on minutiae algorithm and DWT by considering the four parameters - signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), computation time, entropy and IQI. DWT ensures high secured digital network in areas like defense, satellite and related fields.

A discrete wavelet transform-based audio watermarking technique for digital security

A discrete wavelet transform-based audio watermarking technique for digital security

Robust Watermarking Scheme for NIfTI Medical Images

Computed Tomography (CT) scan and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) technologies are widely used in medical field. Within the last few months, due to the increased use of CT scans, millions of patients have had their CT scans done. So, as a result, images showing the Corona Virus for diagnostic purposes were digitally transmitted over the internet. The major problem for the world health care system is a multitude of attacks that affect copyright protection and other ethical issues as images are transmitted over the internet. As a result, it is important to apply a robust and secure watermarking technique to these images. Notably, watermarking schemes have been developed for various image formats, including .jpg, .bmp, and .png, but their impact on NIfTI (Neuroimaging Informatics Technology Initiative) images is not noteworthy. A watermarking scheme based on the Lifting Wavelet Transform (LWT) and QR factorization is presented in this paper. When LWT and QR are combined, the NIfTI image maintains its inherent sensitivity and mitigates the watermarking scheme's robustness. Multiple watermarks are added to the host image in this approach. Measuring the performance of the graphics card is done by using PSNR, SSIM, Q (a formula which measures image quality), SNR, and Normalized correlation. The watermarking scheme withstands a variety of noise attacks and conversions, including image compression and decompression.

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

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.

Robust Watermarking Technique for Sharing Family Photos on Social Media using Aadhar Number and DCT

The mind setup of persons has been changed in today’s environment due to the easily available of internet and smart phone on very low-price cost. Smart phone and internet are two main resources which are being used by persons most of the time in his/her daily routine specially in lockdown due to COVID-19. In this lockdown, persons are doing some creative activity, making fun, etc and recording all his/her this personal information in the form of multimedia contents like text, images, audio and video. This created multimedia content is shared by persons frequently on globe through internet in the daily routine life and some other persons are watching this daily routine activity and making huge business with these data by sometimes with original content or sometimes with modified content without concerns/information/permission of the originator. In this process if everything is going in right way then no issues but if something going wrong then require legal issues and for this, we need to protect our data legally through some methodology. So this paper proposed secure watermarking technique for protecting multimedia content like images using Aadhar number and Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) technique. In this proposed methodology individual can share the information’s with watermarked information which is hidden in shared images and on demand at the time of legal issue originator will show the actuality and its ownership. This paper explained details concepts of the embedding and reverse of embedding ( i.e. extracting) process for authentication of the images and its protection from the misuse or fraud. The experimental result of the proposed methodology is shown on different family photos shared on globe and found robust results.

Novel Watermarking Technique Using Encryption Steganography, Chaotic Logistic Map and Multiple Embedding

Abstract Copyright of patented digital objects such as digital audio, image, video or multimedia information are safe guarded by watermarking. The manufacturer’s logo, used as the watermark or secret information, is watermarked or embedded in the digital object by various techniques. Small size watermark is preferred as it alters the quality of the digital object which may be considered undetectable. However, a large size watermark may be embedded in such way that it does not affect the quality at all, and also a small size watermark is embedded with small effect on the quality of the digital object. In this paper we propose a novel and highly secure watermarking technique using a full size and a half size watermark, the latter is obtained from the first one. The proposed technique consists of two stages. In the first stage we actually embed in the encrypted digital object with encrypted half size watermark, and in the second stage we virtually watermark the de-encrypted digital object from the first stage, by multiple times embedding with encrypted full size watermark. The stage is called virtual as the multiple embedding is cleaned off and the result is the de-encrypted digital object that was obtained from the first stage. Cleaning or reverting the multiple embedding, multiple derived secret information is obtained which are safely stored in the company for utilization against adversaries claiming rights or unauthorized usages. The retrieval of the half size watermark and multiple derived secret information strongly protects the copyright of the digital object.

Secure Watermarking Technique for Medical Images with Visual Evaluation

This paper presents a hybrid watermarking technique for medical images. The method uses a combination of three transforms: Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), and singular value decomposition (SVD). Then, the paper discusses the results of applying the combined method on different medical images from eight patients. The images were watermarked with a small watermark image representing the patients' medical data. The visual quality of the watermarked images (before and after attacks) was analyzed using five quality metrics: PSNR, WSNR, PSNR-HVS-M, PSNR-HVS, and MSSIM. The first four metrics' average values of the watermarked medical images before attacks were approximately 32 db, 35 db, 42 db, and 40 db respectively; while the MSSM index indicated a similarity between the original and watermarked images of more than 97%. However, the metric values decreased significantly after attacking the images with various operations even though the watermark image could be retrieved after almost all attacks. In brief, the initial results indicate that watermarking medical images with patients' data does not significantly affect their visual quality and they can still be used by medical staff.

Machine Learning-Based Robust Watermarking Technique for Medical Image Transmitted Over LTE Network

Abstract This paper discusses a safe and secure watermarking technique using a machine learning algorithm. In this paper, the propagation of a watermarked image is simulated over the third-generation partnership project (3GPP)/long-term evolution (LTE) downlink physical layer. The watermark data are scrambled and a transform domain-based hybrid watermarking technique is used to embed this watermark into the transform coefficients of the host image and transmitted over the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) downlink physical layer. Support vector machine (SVM) is used as a classifier for the classification of non-region of interest (NROI) and region of interest (ROI) in a medical image. The result achieved in this experiment revealed that a 10−6 bit error rate (BER) value is realizable for a greater value of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR; i.e. more than 10.4 dB of SNR). The peak SNR (PSNR) of the received cover image is more than 35 dB, which is acceptable for clinical applications.

Secure Watermarking Technique for Medical Images with Visual Evaluation

This paper presents a hybrid watermarking technique for medical images. The method uses a combination of three transforms: Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), and singular value decomposition (SVD). Then, the paper discusses the results of applying the combined method on different medical images from eight patients. The images were watermarked with a small watermark image representing the patients' medical data. The visual quality of the watermarked images (before and after attacks) was analyzed using five quality metrics: PSNR, WSNR, PSNR-HVS-M, PSNR-HVS, and MSSIM. The first four metrics' average values of the watermarked medical images before attacks were approximately 32 db, 35 db, 42 db, and 40 db respectively; while the MSSM index indicated a similarity between the original and watermarked images of more than 97%. However, the metric values decreased significantly after attacking the images with various operations even though the watermark image could be retrieved after almost all attacks. In brief, the initial results indicate that watermarking medical images with patients' data does not significantly affect their visual quality and they can still be used by medical staff.

A new technique of frequency domain watermarking based on a local ring

This paper presents a new and comparatively secure watermarking technique, in the frequency domain. Our scheme deploys a local ring-based substitution box (S-box). The algebraic algorithm used to synthesize S-box basically exploits one–one correspondence between the multiplicative group of units of the local ring $${\mathbb{Z}}_{512}$$ and the Galois field $$\varvec{F}_{256}$$ . This S-box has high confusion creating capability due to the structural properties of the local ring and fulfills the necessary requirements to be reliably used in multimedia applications. We use this S-box in a watermarking scheme to make our technique more confusing and secure to provide more support in copyrights protection strategies. The proposed non-blind digital watermarking technique deals with the application of discrete cosine transform (DCT) in the frequency domain which is comparatively more robust than spatial domain techniques. In the proposed scheme, first the watermark image is substituted through the S-box, and the scrambled watermark is then embedded in the DCT-transformed host image.‘ To measure the strength of the proposed technique, simulation results and statistical analyses are made. Most significant analyses techniques including measures of homogeneity, contrast, energy, entropy, correlation, mean squared error and peak signal to noise ratio are applied which show coherent results. To determine the robustness of our is effectively strong.

Realization of a New Robust and Secure Watermarking Technique Using DC Coefficient Modification in Pixel Domain and Chaotic Encryption

The proliferation of information and communication technology has made exchange of information easier than ever. Security, Duplication and manipulation of information in such a scenario has become a major challenge to the research community round the globe. Digital watermarking has been found to be a potent tool to deal with such issues. A secure and robust image watermarking scheme based on DC coefficient modification in pixel domain and chaotic encryption has been presented in this paper. The cover image has been divided into 8×8 sub-blocks and instead of computing DC coefficient using Discrete Cosine Transform (DCTI, the authors compute DC coefficient of each block in spatial domain. Watermark bits are embedded by modifying DC coefficients of various blocks in spatial domain. The quantum of change to be brought in various pixels of a block for embedding watermark bit depends upon DC coefficient of respective blocks, nature of watermark bit (0 or 1) to be embedded and the adjustment factor. The security of embedded watermark has been taken care of by using chaotic encryption. Experimental investigations show that besides being highly secure the proposed technique is robust to both signal processing and geometric attacks. Further, the proposed scheme is computationally efficient as DC coefficient which holds the watermark information has been computed in pixel domain instead of using DCT on an image block.

Privacy and Ownership Protection Digital Data Techniques: Comparison and Survey

Objectives: The main objective for writing this paper is to review about classification of various digital data hiding techniques, their types and along with their comparison. Methods: This paper provides the complete overview about the various types of data hiding techniques currently available and highlighted the important concepts behind each technique. A brief overview of the research work on studies related to DHT is considered and several research papers on these topics are cited. This paper reviews various recent advancement made in the field of DHT particularly the cryptography, steganography and digital watermarking. Findings: The various digital data hiding techniques have their own unique features and processing methods for hiding or maintaining the secrecy of the original information but watermarking is emerging as one of the most competent way to care for digital data at present. This paper also provides an effective source of information about the possible research gap in the field of creating robust and secure watermarking technique.

An Efficient Watermarking Scheme for Medical Data Security With the Aid of Neural Network

Digital watermarking has emerged as major technique for ensuring security for various types of data like medical data, digital copyright protection, transaction tracing and so on. With the advancement in digital data distribution over the network there has been increase in the need for protection of such data from unauthorized copying or usages. Watermarking helps in providing the security to some extent. Robustness against any sort of unauthenticated attack is the major requirement of watermarking. In this paper we proposed an efficient watermarking technique for medical data security with the aid of neural network. Usage of neural network is generally used to create and control watermarking strength automatically. This method provides better watermarked data which can be highly secured to unauthorized usage. It is observed that the proposed method provides better security for the multimedia data when compared with other data security methods.

Experimental Study of Sparse Watermarking Techniques for Multibiometric System

This paper focus on study and analysis of effect of watermarking technique in spatial domain combined with cs theory on verification and authentication performance of multibiometric system. In presented techniques, watermark fingerprint is compressed using CS theory before embedding into host biometric. These compressed fingerprint features embed into face image such that watermarked face image is used for verification and authentication of individual. Compressed fingerprint features are used for cross verification and authentication of individual. The modified LSB substitution based technique and modified correlation based technique using WGN combined with CS theory used to secure biometric data at system database and communication channel between two checkpoints of multibiometric system, respectively. The verification accuracy of multibiometric system using these watermarking techniques is around 96 % with more computational security and high perceptual quality of biometric data. The results show that these watermarking techniques do not have effect on authentication performance of multibiometric system. The novelty of paper is combined compressive sensing theory with watermarking technique for security of multibiometric data.

A Secure Watermarking and Tempering Detection Technique Using 2 Level DWT

Digital Watermarking is a vital field for copyrights of a variety of electronic documents and media. Mostly easy to get to on the Internet with images, it can occasionally be attractive to apply copyrights. Digital watermarking is a method of combining data into a digital signal. In digital watermarking we work on two images one is for watermark image, which is overlie on the original image (secondary image) that gives security to the image. It acts as a digital mark, providing the image a good judgment of ownership or authenticity. Digital watermarking method is very inspiring for image authentication or security for attacks. This paper present a review on digital watermarking their classification, application, techniques, attacks and also tampering detection in digital watermarking. We proposed a new algorithm for digital watermarking and tampering detection technique, by combing these techniques, we can improve the security of image.

Fusion Framework for Robust and Secured Watermarking

This paper presents a robust and secure watermarking technique for digital image. To implement the technique, Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is applied on cover image. Further on Low-Low (LL) sub-band of DWT, Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) is applied which is followed by Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). To introduce the secure watermarking, watermark is secured using Arnold Transformation and embedded in the cover image. Parameters such as Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Normalized Correlation (NC) are used for checking the reliability of the proposed technique. Different attacks like noise, filtering, rotation, cropping, flipping, and compression are applied on watermarked image to check the robustness of the proposed approach.

Controllable Secure Watermarking Technique for Tradeoff Between Robustness and Security

The circular watermarking (CW) technique has attracted increasing attention because it can resist the estimation of secret carriers in the watermarked only attack (WOA) framework. However, the existing CW schemes are not applicable whenever a malicious watermark removal attack can take place. This is because they either have low security because the attacker can disclose the embedding subspace or have low robustness. Based on an existing CW scheme called transportation natural watermarking (TNW), this correspondence presents a new CW technique for the tradeoff between robustness and security, which we refer to as controllable secure watermarking (CSW). The idea behind the CSW is that by altering the host signal in the orthogonal complement of the embedding subspace, we can make the watermarked signal have an orthogonally invariant distribution in a higher dimensional subspace including the embedding subspace. Orthogonally invariant distribution essentially requires that the distribution does not change if multiplied by any freely chosen orthogonal matrix, and the higher dimensional subspace is referred to as invariant subspace. We prove that the attacker can only reduce the uncertainty of secret carriers up to the invariant subspace. The dimension of the invariant subspace can be used for the tradeoff between robustness and security. Further, the experiment results show that the robustness-security tradeoff provided by the CSW is efficient. In particular, with the increase of the dimension of the invariant subspace, the security of the CSW will increase quickly while its robustness will only decrease slowly.