Authentication Watermarking Research Articles

A DCT Fractional Bit Replacement Based Dual Watermarking Algorithm for Image Authentication

Abstract: Watermarking is a process of embedding a message inside a digital signal like an image, video or text. It is used for several key reasons such as authenticity verification, ownership recognition and hidden communication. In this paper, we discuss about image watermarking, where secret messages are stored in images. Introduction: We propose a dual watermarking approach, which is based on Discrete Cosine Transform, Discrete Wavelet Transform and Singular Value Decomposition methods. This paper considers one watermark as robust and other water mark as fragile. Method: The robust watermark is embedded in Discrete Wavelet Transform- Singular Value Decomposition - domain and is used to transmit hidden messages. The fragile watermark is embedded in Discrete Cosine Transform domain and is used for verification of secret message of the robust watermark. The proposed algorithm is tested in the experimental results section and shows promising results against denoising, rotation, translation and cropping attacks. Result: The results show that the performance of the proposed algorithm in terms of mean squared error, structural similarity and peak signal to noise ratio is S4considerable as compared with the existing methods. Discussion: We present the comparison results with Himanshu et. al. in table 10, from which we can see that our method performs better with gaussian noise and rotational attack only lacking with Salt and Pepper noise. Fig. 7 and Fig. 8, in terms of resulting PSNR shows the variation of noise variance and degree of rotation. From the graphs it is evident that out method performs better against Gaussian and rotational attack. Conclusion: In this paper a dual watermarking method is proposed in which one watermark is fragile which is called as authentication watermark whereas the other watermark is robust and is called as the information watermark. The authentication watermark is embedded in the fractional part of DCT domain in the cover image and the information watermark is embedded in the diagonal vector of the LL sub-band.

Fragile watermarking for image authentication based on DWT-SVD-DCT techniques

Many fragile watermarking schemes for image authentication have been proposed to protect the integrity of digital images. However, these schemes still yielded unsatisfactory image quality of the watermarked images and low accuracy of tamper detection. In this paper, we propose a new, fragile watermarking scheme for image authentication based on the combination of discrete wavelets transform (DWT), singular value decomposition (SVD), and discrete cosines transform (DCT) algorithms. The feature coefficients are extracted and are used to embed the authentication code by using the quantization index modulation (QIM) process. To guarantee that the extracted authentication code is correct, the Gram-Schmidt process is used to adjust the feature coefficients. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed scheme provides good quality watermarked images and achieves high accuracy of tamper detection under different attacks, i.e., direct cropping and object insertion attacks.

Region-based reversible medical image watermarking algorithm for privacy protection and integrity authentication

Medical images are widely used in telemedicine, sharing and electronic transmission between hospitals. While enjoying convenience, medical images also face privacy disclosure, illegal copy and malicious tamper, etc. It is highly important to ensure privacy and integrity of medical images. Cogitating the above needs, a reversible medical image watermarking algorithm for privacy protection and integrity authentication is proposed. Firstly, the medical image is divided into the ROI (Region of Interest) and RONI (Region of Non-Interest) based on active contour model. Then, the proposed “Three-Dimensional Watermarks” are generated, including authentication watermark, restoration watermark and privacy watermark, which are produced by the novel Parallel Lattice Hash Function, the proposed Neighborhood Difference Method, and the proposed encryption algorithm, respectively. Moreover, “Double-Layer Reversible Embedding Strategy Based on Difference Expansion” is modified in ROI to improve embedding capacity, and “Histogram Modification Reversible Embedding Strategy of Difference Image” is modified to adaptively acquire four or more peak points, which is more flexible than common algorithms. Experimental results confirm the efficient of the proposed scheme, and demonstrate it not only realizes privacy protection, integrity authentication, reversibility, but also holds the characteristics of higher security, larger capacity and better restoration quality.

An efficient low bit rate image watermarking and tamper detection for image authentication

This study presents the vulnerability of digital documents and its effective way to protect the ownership and detection of unauthorized modification of multimedia data. Watermarking is an effective way to protect vulnerable data in a digital environment. In this paper, a watermarking algorithm has been proposed based on a lossy compression algorithm to ensure authentication and detection of forgery. In this proposed method, the CDF9/7 biorthogonal wavelet is used to transform the watermark image and encoded the wavelet coefficients using Set Partition in Hierarchical Tree algorithm. Then, the encoded bits are encrypted by shuffling and encrypting using symmetric keys. After that the encrypted bits are inserted into the Least Significant Bit position of the cover image. In addition, two tamper detection bits are generated based on texture information and pixel location and inserted in the watermarked image. The proposed algorithm reconstructs the watermark and the tampering region more efficiently and achieved 56.5463 dB PSNR for STARE database. Experimental result shows that the proposed algorithm is effectively prevented different attacks and ensure the integrity of watermark bits within the watermarked image. Also finds the tampered region more efficiently compared with the existing state of art algorithms.

Color image watermarking for content authentication and self-restoration applications based on a dual-domain approach

Digital image watermarking has been witnessed as a powerful tool that can be used in image ownership identification, copyright protection and content authentication applications. In this paper, a dual-domain watermarking scheme for digital image authentication with self-recovery capabilities is proposed. The proposed scheme has a high ability to recover tampered image regions while pertaining high watermarking imperceptibility and high robustness under various types of attacks. The proposed scheme employs two watermarks: 1) content-dependent, and, 2) content-independent, where the content-dependent watermark contains two-bit sequences for authentication and recovery operations. The authentication bits are generated based on the singular value decomposition (SVD) of each block, while the recovery bits are generated from the average value within selected sub-blocks. The independent watermark is embedded using the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), whereas, the dependent watermark is embedded directly into the first and second least significant bits (LSB) of the image pixels. The developed dual-domain watermarking scheme has exhibited high robustness performance against various attacks with high imperceptibility and watermarking capacity as well. For authentication purposes, the proposed scheme incorporated three developed measures to detect the authenticity of the probe image, and, to accurately localize tampered regions. The experimental results have shown that the proposed scheme has a high imperceptibility, compared to other existing schemes, and can effectively distinguish malicious from incidental attacks with accurate tampering localization. Moreover, the proposed scheme exhibits high performance against moderate-to-strong incidental attacks such as noise and low-quality JPEG attacks.

Blind Robust and Self-Embedding Fragile Image Watermarking for Image Authentication and Copyright Protection with Recovery Capability

Blind Robust and Self-Embedding Fragile Image Watermarking for Image Authentication and Copyright Protection with Recovery Capability

Visual attention model based dual watermarking for simultaneous image copyright protection and authentication

In this paper, a visual attention model based dual watermarking scheme has been proposed for simultaneous image copyright protection and authentication. The suggested method simultaneously embeds two watermarks inside the host image. First of all, the robust watermark is embedded in the most visually salient region by Hessenberg factorization technique, which has proven to give better results in terms of imperceptibility and robustness. Subsequently, the second watermark acts as a fragile watermark for the purpose of tamper detection and localization. The fragile watermark is infused inside the image via fragile 8 Bit Plane Slicing, as we require for the watermark to be highly responsive to majority of geometric, and non-geometric impairments. The proposed scheme achieves an average Peak Signal to Noise Ratio and Structural SIMilarity Index of 46.88 dB and 0.9897 respectively. Experimental results depict that the projected scheme is extremely robust against most kinds of geometric, signal-processing, and hybrid attacks with an average Normalized Cross Correlation of 0.9401. Moreover, due to the incorporation of the fragile watermark, it can detect and localize tampering of an image with extreme accuracy.

An intelligent and blind dual color image watermarking for authentication and copyright protection

In this paper, a blind dual watermarking scheme for color images is proposed by embedding an invisible robust watermark to protect copyright, as well as a fragile watermark is embedded for image authentication. For the purpose of copyright protection, the robust watermark is embedded into the blue channel of RGB color space based on DWT, HVS and SVD domains using a specialized PSO optimization to balance the trade-off between robustness and imperceptibility. In addition, the robust watermarking capacity in SVD is doubled by inserting two robust watermark bits into each selected blocks and the robust watermark can be extracted blindly. For the purpose of authentication, a fragile watermark is embedded into all channels of RGB color space using a new way to manipulate the diagonal singular values. The authenticity of a suspected image can be verified in the absence of original watermark and host images. The combination of robust and fragile watermarking in the proposed scheme provides a suitable mechanism to protect valuable and original color images. According to the experimental and comparative results, the proposed scheme provides superior outcomes with high robustness, imperceptibility, and capacity along with a good accuracy rate in locating the tampered area of an image.

Multipurpose Watermarking Algorithm for Medical Images

Considering the existing medical image watermarking algorithms, a single function often has limitations, and a multipurpose watermarking algorithm for medical images is proposed. First, medical images are divided into regions of interest (ROIs) and regions of noninterest (RONIs). Then, the authentication watermark produced for each subblock of the ROI is embedded into the corresponding mapping subblock. The visible watermark is embedded into the RONI, and, finally, the watermark information and constructed authentication information in each subblock of the ROI are embedded into the corresponding RONI subblock. Simulation results show that the embedded visible watermark can protect and facilitate medical image management. In addition, the proposed algorithm has strong robustness and very good visual quality. It can simultaneously realize copyright protection and content authentication and also has high tamper localization capability.

Fragile watermarking for image authentication using BRINT and ELM

Privacy and security concerns regarding digital information have been increasing with advancements in multimedia and network technologies. Digital images are an integral component of online-distributed content, which plays a crucial role in forming public perceptions and opinions. They also play a major role in sensitive areas, such as law and defense. Any attempt to tamper with them is, therefore, a serious issue. One common approach to this problem is fragile image watermarking, which is used to ensure the authenticity of digital content. In this paper, a new fragile watermarking method for the authentication of digital images is proposed based on a binary rotation invariant and noise tolerant (BRINT) local texture descriptor and an extreme learning machine (ELM). BRINT is used to generate and retrieve the watermark in both the embedding and extraction procedures. In parallel, ELM is used in both procedures to learn and recover any tampered areas. The experimental results showed that the proposed scheme does not degrade image quality, allows for tamper detection, and has a recovery ability comparable with state-of-the-art fragile and semi-fragile watermarking schemes. Moreover, the proposed scheme has been validated as a fragile watermarking method with the potential to detect and locate modifications in digital images, such as copy-paste forgery, JPEG compression, and noise addition. This method is useful in sensitive fields, like defense, law, and journalism, in which decision-making based on digital visual information is necessary, to ensure that an image is authentic and has not been tampered with.

High-Fidelity Reversible Image Watermarking Based on Effective Prediction Error-Pairs Modification

In reversible watermarking for image authentication, less degradation of the marked image is always desirable. For minimum distortion, the pairwise prediction-error expansion (PEE) technique was recently proposed to modify errors jointly. Although its superiority over conventional PEE has been verified, its potential has not been fully exploited yet. In this paper, we focus on optimal modification and propose an enhanced pairwise PEE. First, it is observed in PVO-based pairwise PEE that the histogram peak varies with relative location when predicting the largest/smallest two pixels. Then, a more effective 2D mapping is proposed by content-dependently selecting the expansion bin after introducing spatial location into prediction. Next, the 2D mapping is further extended considering prediction in non-smooth region tends to produce errors with large magnitude. Finally, we also propose to flexibly define the spatial location to achieve content-dependent prediction and further enhancement. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves better capacity-distortion trade-off and outperforms several state-of-the-art schemes.

A self-recovery watermarking scheme based on block truncation coding and quantum chaos map

To take into account the invisibility, recovery quality, detection ability, and security, a new digital image fragile watermarking method based on block truncation coding (BTC) and quantum chaos map is proposed. In this method generates the authentication watermark for each 4 × 4 block and generates the recovery watermark for each 2 × 2 block by block truncation coding. For each block, the block truncation coding is used to classify the image blocks into smooth blocks and rough blocks. For different blocks, recovery data can be generated by allocating fewer bits to the smooth blocks and more bits to the rough blocks to encoding the block content. Quantum chaos map is used to generate the block mapping sequence for embedding recovery watermark to improve the shortcoming of watermarking such as small keyspace and low security. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme improves the quality of watermarked and recovered images. Additionally, this approach achieves higher security than the existing methods, under different attacks, such as general tampering, collage attack, content-only, and a hybrid attack.

Watermarking Framework for Authentication and Self-recovery of Tampered Colour Images

Methods of authentication and self-recovery of tampered information in digital images have been in constant development during the last years. These frameworks are developed by watermarking techniques, which generate an image digest, which is embedded inside the image that must be protected. In this paper, a method of authentication and self-recovery of tampered information in digital images is proposed. Our approach first generates the authentication watermarks, which are based on XOR operations on non-overlapping blocks, subsequently by using a halftoning technique the recovery watermark is generated. To have a higher performance, three copies of each watermark are embedded to have more chance to extract the recovery watermark. To evaluate the quality of the obtained images, the objective criterion of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) are used. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in comparisons with other schemes reported in the literature, where the quality of the watermarked images, the quality of the reconstruction images and the recovery rate of each scheme were evaluated.

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 Review of different Methods of Watermarking for Medical Images Authentication

A Review of different Methods of Watermarking for Medical Images Authentication

Digital Watermarking for Image Authentication using Spatial-Scale Domain based Techniques

This paper aims in presenting a thorough comparison of performance and usefulness of concept of spatial-scale domain based techniques in digital watermarking in order to sustain the ownership, security and true authentication. Spatial-scale based image watermarking techniques provides the information of 2-Dimensional (2-D) signal at different scales and levels, which is desirable for image watermarking. Further, these techniques emerged as a powerful and efficient tool to overcome the limitation of Fourier, spatial, as well as, purely frequency based techniques. The spatial-scale based watermarking techniques, namely, Contourlet Transform (CT), Non Sub-sampled Contourlet Transform (NSCT), Stationary Wavelet Transform (SWT) and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) have been selected for watermarking process. Further, the comparison of performance of the selected watermarking techniques have been carried out in terms of different metrics, such as Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Tamper Assessment Factor (TAF) and Mean Structural Similarity Index (MSSIM). Analysis of result shows that multi-directional and shift-invariant NSCT technique outperforms the SWT and DWT based image watermarking techniques in terms of authentication, better capture quality, and tampering resistance, subjective and objective evaluation.

Integrated Discrete Wavelet Transform and Singular Value Decomposition based Biometric Watermarking for Authentication using Iris Images

Recently with respect to developments in watermarking techniques, intruders are capable of accessing the database. Several strategies are designed for securing information. Utilization of watermarks will be recommended with the background pertaining to several biometric strategies comprising fingerprints, position of palm, gait, iris, speech, etc. Among the available approaches digital watermarking will be one of the effective techniques. Prominent manner of carrying out the digital watermarking will be spatial domain along with strong transform domain. This paper establishes a strategy for providing the watermark, besides biometric information by utilizing Wavelet Transform in addition to Singular Value Decomposition. Utilization of biometric rather than conservative watermark enhances protection of information. The utilized biometric will be iris. Consideration of iris template as watermark guarantees iris pattern communication, whereas watermarking iris images might be involved in assisting, safeguarding of information in addition to identification of iris image moderation. The mentioned work involved in carrying out analysis means checking the authentication under various attacks along with no attacks. Motivation in utilization of watermarking will depend on enhancement in the field of biometric recognition. On the other hand, utilization of biometric patterns as “message” has to be designed with conservative strong watermarking for safeguarding the information. So as to ensure biometric appreciation to the development of watermark.

A Camera Shooting Resilient Watermarking Scheme for Underpainting Documents

This paper designs a novel underpainting based camera shooting resilient (CSR) document watermarking algorithm for dealing with the leak source tracking problem. By applying such algorithm, we can extract the authentication watermark information from the candid photographs. The watermarked underpainting contains three significant properties. 1) Inconspicuousness. The watermarked underpainting is inconspicuous and it will not easily be maliciously attacked. 2) Robustness. We propose DCT-based watermark embedding algorithm and distortion compensation based extracting algorithm, which make the watermark robust to camera shooting process. 3) Autocorrelation. We design the flip-based method to arrange the watermarked underpainting. So that a complete watermark region can be accurately located even if part of the document is recorded. Compared with previous watermarking algorithms, the proposed scheme guaranteed content independent embedding as well as the robustness to the camera shooting process. Besides, the proposed scheme satisfies the accuracy of extraction even when the captured document is incomplete.

Watermark Authentication for Secure Data Aggregation in WSN Based on Secure Hash Algorithm and Node Identifier

Watermark Authentication for Secure Data Aggregation in WSN Based on Secure Hash Algorithm and Node Identifier