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Multipurpose Image Watermarking: Ownership Check, Tamper Detection and Self-recovery

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Abstract

In the present digital scenario, false ownership claims and tampering with digital data have become serious concerns for users. There have been a very few schemes proposed in the past that can provide solutions for the three major requirements (ownership proof, tamper detection and self-recovery) in an efficient way. This paper presents a blind multipurpose image watermarking scheme for copyright/ownership protection, image authentication, and image restoration. Two different watermarking strategies (robust and fragile) are used to achieve the multipurpose nature. For Robust watermark insertion, an encrypted watermark is inserted into the host image using IWT (Integer wavelet transform). Afterward, a 9-base notation-based least significant bit replacement approach is used to embed the fragile sequence along with recovery information in a controlled randomized manner. During the testing phase, high imperceptibility, decent robustness, and good self-recovery are noticed against different types of attack. The scheme provides nearly 99.8% accurate tamper localization and can significantly recover even a severely tampered (up to 80%) image. The performance comparison with other existing watermarking schemes confirms the superiority of the proposed scheme. The multipurpose nature of the scheme makes it versatile and practical for the current scenario of digital technologies and era of internet.

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Data Availability

The dataset used is publicly available on the internet.

Code Availability

The code will be made available on reasonable demand.

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  1. Electronics and Communication Engineering, PDPM Indian Institute of Information Technology Design and Manufacturing, Jabalpur, MP, 482005, India

    Rishi Sinhal & Irshad Ahmad Ansari

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  1. Rishi Sinhal
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  2. Irshad Ahmad Ansari
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Correspondence to Irshad Ahmad Ansari.

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Sinhal, R., Ansari, I.A. Multipurpose Image Watermarking: Ownership Check, Tamper Detection and Self-recovery. Circuits Syst Signal Process 41, 3199–3221 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00034-021-01926-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00034-021-01926-z

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