Dual watermarking framework for privacy protection and content authentication of multimedia
Introduction
Technology has made its way in almost every sector of life like commerce, defense, banking, movie industry, health-sector etc. Use of communication technology in the mentioned sectors involves data collection/transfer 24 7, from millions of individuals and devices. In several complex state-of-art systems huge data is shared in real time between different sensors and modules to carry out several automatic or monitored tasks [1], [2]. Such data may include health information, banking records and secret documents in the form of images, text files, audio and videos, acquired through various means and processed/stored by the different systems. The information exchanged is usually sensitive, as it comprises of private/secret data of individuals and organizations [3]. A minute alteration could result in misleading information affecting decision making of whole system. The presence of state-of-the-art multimedia editing tools are making it very easy to copy/edit and reproduce various multimedia objects. Given to this fact, a large number of data breaches caused due to various cyber-attacks have been reported in recent years. In US alone the number of data breaches arouse from 1093 million in 2016 to 1579 million in 2017. The total electronic records exposed in 2017 was found to be five time greater than 2016 [4]. These breaches proved quite costly in many cases as the companies lost a huge investment [5]. Electronic-healthcare sector of late has been a target of various data breaches. In July 2017 a cyberattack resulted in theft of medical images and details of patient visits, related to more than 12,800 patients of Arkansas Oral Facial Surgery Centre [6]. The Detroit health system reported a patient data breach in October 2017 due a cybercriminal theft of some email credentials wherein data of 18,470 patients was stolen [7]. Similar other multiple data breaches have been reported where privacy of millions of individuals has been exposed and thereby resulting in huge loses to the concerned organizations due to legal actions enforced by law agencies [8], [9], [10]. The healthcare organizations spend about $200 for every theft and more than $2 million for every data breach incident. The overall economic loss suffered by the US healthcare industry alone is about $5.6 billion per year, for rectification and management of lost and stolen records [11]. In India the scenario is no different and according to a latest report from Motion Picture Distributors’ Association (India), the Indian film industry loses around 2.7 billion dollars and over 60,000 jobs every year because of piracy [12]. A latest study reveals that the revenue at box-office would increase by 15% in case piracy is completely eliminated [13]. The online platforms like dark net and overlay nets are the easy to access, strong and unmonitored bases, for these hackers needing internet access and few high configuration processors. Similarly, several companies/agencies analyze the behavior of individuals sharing their data through social network services (SNSs), and use number techniques with the help of researchers to channelize their strategies accordingly [14]. Besides movie and healthcare industries, various data breaches have been reported in other industries [15], [16], [17]. So there is need to ensure extreme data security in all these areas. The focus of the cybersecurity techniques has been mainly in the sectors like e-banking, e-commerce, defense, multimedia industry, social media and e-healthcare. Cyber security is generally achieved using various technologies like hashing, steganography, watermarking and digital signatures etc. [18]. However, of late digital watermarking, has been proven, to be quite effective method for copyright protection and content authentication along with security and privacy of users.
Digital watermarking deals with hiding of secret data watermark) in some digital content which can be extracted only with the accurate knowledge of embedding procedure and some secret keys. Watermarking can be used by systems for applications like e-healthcare, defense, e-commerce, smart cities etc. [19], [20], [21]. Watermarking schemes are classified in many a ways [22]. Robust and fragile watermarking techniques are required for copyright protection and content authentication respectively. Some of the recently reported fragile watermarking schemes capable of informing the receiver whether the information received is tempered or not, could be seen in [23], [24]. The fragile watermarking schemes, usually implemented in spatial domain, offer least complexity and high embedding capacity but are less resistant to common signal processing attacks like compression [25]. Robust watermarking schemes, usually implemented in transform domain, in contrast focus on hiding the secret data in a cover media so that it could be recovered even if cover media is attacked [26], [27], [28].
In this paper, a blind dual watermarking framework using DWT, DCT, Arnold transform and a novel encryption algorithm has been proposed for privacy protection and content authentication of multimedia images. The block-based (DCT) transform avoids the blocking effects usually suffered by most watermarking schemes. This technique offers multiple options for the user to embed watermark as per various needs. Prior to embedding, Arnold transform and a novel encryption technique are applied to the watermark, to improve the security of the proposed watermarking framework. The secret encrypted data bits of the watermark are embedded into the DC coefficients of the image blocks, to achieve better robustness against the most of the signal processing attacks. As the proposed framework uses block processing procedure, it is flexible to adopt any of the image compression standards.
The main contributions of the proposed work are summarized as follows:
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Strong robustness is achieved by embedding the watermark bits in a way which ensures optimal difference between the modified coefficients. The difference between two coefficients is made to lie in four different zones where two zones are used for watermark bit ‘1’ and the remaining two are used to hold bit ‘0’. In addition, a sufficient guard band is used to separate the zones after embedding the bit ‘0’ and ‘1’. Since ample guard band is kept between the zones, any manipulation of the coefficients due to attacks fail to shift the difference in the wrong zone. The performance against geometric attacks is enhanced due to the application of Arnold transform which in addition to the security ensures that the neighboring bits of the watermark are embedded in distant blocks. So the effect of geometric attacks which target the particular portion of the image is minimized.
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The quality of the images is preserved by using only two coefficients out of 64 coefficients in an 8 8 block for embedding. Also an efficient coefficient correlation between two selected neighborhood block coefficients, ensures least modification done on the blocks due to embedding. The advantage of using two separate pair of zones is that, the modification of coefficients required for embedding watermark bit ‘1’ and ‘0’ is not too high. Thus ensuring good quality watermarked image.
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To ensure the tamper identification and localization, a fragile watermark is embedded in the spatial domain. Employing proposed fragile watermarking algorithm ensures that any minute tampering carried out on watermarked media effects the hidden watermark drastically.
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The effectiveness of the technique is tested for hybrid attacks in addition to singular attacks. This is important because, in real time scenarios the attacks on the image are usually multiple. The proposed algorithm performs well for dual attacks and even to most of the simultaneous triple attacks.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the related work. Watermark preparation has been discussed in Section 3. Section 4 describes the watermark embedding and extraction algorithms. Experimental results and discussion have been presented in Section 5. The paper concludes with Section 6.
Section snippets
Related work
The rapid rise of information exchange through the internet has given birth to several kind of cyber threats faced by the organizations working for the accomplishment of this data exchange. To counter such threats, and ensure data security and integrity during transit, a continuous research in multiple areas of relevant technologies is on worldwide. Digital watermarking has been established as one of the best techniques for realizing the multiple goals of authentication, copyright protection
Watermark preperation
The security of the watermark is an important factor in both the copyright protection and authentication applications. Usually there are some chances for an unauthorized user to crack the embedding algorithm by using a processor with high computational power and hence obtain the secret information (watermark) hidden in some media. In order to increase the security of the watermark, which is the secret information to be hidden in a cover media, we use two different encryption techniques shown in
Proposed watermarking technique
Proposed watermarking system provides two variants for copyright and authentication. The two variants are referred to as Scheme I and Scheme II respectively. Scheme I is used for the generation of robust watermarked images and as such could find applications in the copyright protection and fingerprinting. We have used the transform domain for embedding the watermarking data due to excellent spatial-frequency localization of DWT and energy compaction property of DCT. These properties enable a
Experimental results
In this section, we present the subjective and objective quality metrics obtained during the experimental evaluation of the proposed algorithm. Several standard color and gray scale cover images like Lena, Baboon, Boat, Peppers, Plane, etc. are used for evaluation and experimentation of the proposed scheme. Some of the test images of size 512 512 and watermarks used for the analysis are shown in Fig. 4. The two main evaluation parameters to describe performance of a watermarking scheme are
Conclusion
In this paper two new watermarking schemes namely Scheme I and Scheme II have been proposed for copyright protection and authentication of digital content exchanged through insecure networks. The schemes have been evaluated for gray-scale, color and medical images. Scheme I uses combined features of DWT and DCT to embed a robust watermark in a gray-scale image. Scheme II embeds a robust watermark and a fragile logo in the host RGB image. Scheme I has been developed with an aim to develop a
Acknowledgments
This publication is an outcome of the R&D work undertaken project under the Visvesvaraya PhD Scheme of Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, Government of India, being implemented by Digital India Corporation and in part is supported by Department of Science and Technology (DST) New Delhi, India under DST inspire scheme.
Nasir N. Hurrah is a doctoral student in the Department of Electronics and IT, University of Kashmir. He is pursuing Ph.D. under VISVESVARAYA PHD Scheme for Electronics and I.T., sponsored by Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology Government of India and is currently working on the Development of Robust image watermarking techniques for copyright protection and authentication.
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Nasir N. Hurrah is a doctoral student in the Department of Electronics and IT, University of Kashmir. He is pursuing Ph.D. under VISVESVARAYA PHD Scheme for Electronics and I.T., sponsored by Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology Government of India and is currently working on the Development of Robust image watermarking techniques for copyright protection and authentication.
Shabir A. Parah has completed his M.Sc., M. Phil and Ph.D. in Electronics from University of Kashmir, Srinagar in the year 2004, 2010 and 2013 respectively in the field of Signal processing and Data hiding. He is working as Assistant Professor in the department of Electronics and I.T, University of Kashmir, Srinagar. His fields of interest are Multimedia Signal Processing, Secure Communication, Digital Watermarking and Steganography. Dr. Shabir A. Parah has guided about twenty five PG projects. He has published more than 100 research papers in International/National journals and conference proceedings.
Nazir A. Loan is a doctoral scholar in the Department of Electronics and IT, University of Kashmir and is currently working on the Development of Robust watermarking algorithms for multimedia applications. He is INSPIRE fellow of Department of Science and Technology Government of India.
Javaid A. Sheikh has completed his M.Sc., M. Phil and Ph.D. in Electronics from University of Kashmir, Srinagar in the year 2004, 2008 and 2012 respectively in the field of communications and Signal Processing. He is working as Assistant Professor in the department of Electronics and I.T University of Kashmir, Srinagar. His fields of interest are Wireless Communications, design and development of efficient MIMO OFDM based wireless communication techniques, Spread Spectrum modulation, Digital Signal Processing, Electromagnetics. He has published about ninety research papers in International and National journals and conference proceedings.
Mohamed Elhoseny received the Ph.D. degree in Computer and Information from Mansoura University, Egypt (in a scientific research channel with Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of North Texas, USA). Dr. Elhoseny is currently an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Computers and Information, Mansoura University. Collectively, Dr. Elhoseny authored/co-authored over 70 International Journal articles, Conference Proceedings, Book Chapters, and 3 Springer books. Dr. Elhoseny serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Big Data and Cloud Innovation Journal and Frontiers of Supercomputing. Besides, he is an Associate Editor of several journals such as IEEE Access, and PLOS One journal. Dr. Elhoseny guest-edited several special issues at many journals published by IEEE, Hindawi, Springer, Inderscience, and MDPI. Moreover, he served as the co-chair, the publication chair, the program chair, and a track chair for several international conferences published by IEEE and Springer.
Dr. Elhoseny is a TPC Member or Reviewer in 30+ International Conferences and Workshops. Furthermore, he has been reviewing papers for 20+ International Journals including IEEE Communications Magazine, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, IEEE Sensors Letters, IEEE Communication Letters, Elsevier Computer Communications, Computer Networks, Sustainable Cities and Society, Wireless Personal Communications, and Expert Systems with Applications.
Khan Muhammad is a researcher at Intelligent Media Laboratory (IM Lab), Sejong University, Seoul, South Korea. His research interests include medical image analysis (brain MRI, diagnostic hysteroscopy and wireless capsule endoscopy), information security (steganography, encryption, watermarking and image hashing), video summarization, multimedia, computer vision, fire/smoke detection and surveillance video analysis. He has published over 50 papers in peer-reviewed international journals and conferences in these research areas with target venues as IEEE TII, TIE, TSMC-Systems, IoT, Access, TSC, Elsevier IJIM, INS, Neurocomputing, PRL, FGCS, COMCOM, COMIND, JPDC, PMC, BSPC, CAEE, Springer MTAP, JOMS, and RTIP, etc. He is serving as a professional reviewer for over 40 well-reputed journals and conferences including IEEE TII, COMMAG, NETWORK, WCOM, IoT, TIP, TCSVT, TVT, Access, ACM TMCCA, Elsevier FGCS, IJIM, INS, INFFUS, Neurocomputing, PRL, JNCA, COMCOM, SIGPROC, COMNET, COMIND, JPDC, CAEE, Springer MTAP, MONET, JOMS, SIVP, EURASIP JIVP, T& F Journal of Experimental and Theoretical AI, SAGE IJDSN, CCCT 2015, ICNC 2017, AINA 2017, and CMES-2018. He also acted as TPC member of AINA 2017 for the track “Multimedia Systems and Applications”. He is currently involved in editing of several special issues as GE/LGE. He is a member of the IEEE.