A novel semi-fragile forensic watermarking scheme for remote sensing images

Peer-reviewedA semi-fragile watermarking scheme for multiple band images is presented. We propose to embed a mark into remote sensing images applying a tree structured vector quantization approach to the pixel signatures, instead of processing each band separately. The signature of themmultispectral or hyperspectral image is used to embed the mark in it order to detect any significant modification of the original image. The image is segmented into threedimensional blocks and a tree structured vector quantizer is built for each block. These trees are manipulated using an iterative algorithm until the resulting block satisfies a required criterion which establishes the embedded mark. The method is shown to be able to preserve the mark under lossy compression (above a given threshold) but, at the same time, it detects possibly forged blocks and their position in the whole image.Se presenta un esquema de marcas de agua semi-frágiles para múltiples imágenes de banda. Proponemos incorporar una marca en imágenes de detección remota, aplicando un enfoque de cuantización del vector de árbol estructurado con las definiciones de píxel, en lugar de procesar cada banda por separado. La firma de la imagen hiperespectral se utiliza para insertar la marca en el mismo orden para detectar cualquier modificación significativa de la imagen original. La imagen es segmentada en bloques tridimensionales y un cuantificador de vector de estructura de árbol se construye para cada bloque. Estos árboles son manipulados utilizando un algoritmo iteractivo hasta que el bloque resultante satisface un criterio necesario que establece la marca incrustada. El método se muestra para poder preservar la marca bajo compresión con pérdida (por encima de un umbral establecido) pero, al mismo tiempo, detecta posiblemente bloques forjados y su posición en la imagen entera.Es presenta un esquema de marques d'aigua semi-fràgils per a múltiples imatges de banda. Proposem incorporar una marca en imatges de detecció remota, aplicant un enfocament de quantització del vector d'arbre estructurat amb les definicions de píxel, en lloc de processar cada banda per separat. La signatura de la imatge hiperespectral s'utilitza per inserir la marca en el mateix ordre per detectar qualsevol modificació significativa de la imatge original. La imatge és segmentada en blocs tridimensionals i un quantificador de vector d'estructura d'arbre es construeix per a cada bloc. Aquests arbres són manipulats utilitzant un algoritme iteractiu fins que el bloc resultant satisfà un criteri necessari que estableix la marca incrustada. El mètode es mostra per poder preservar la marca sota compressió amb pèrdua (per sobre d'un llindar establert) però, al mateix temps, detecta possiblement blocs forjats i la seva posició en la imatge sencera

Digital rights management techniques for H.264 video

This work aims to present a number of low-complexity digital rights management (DRM) methodologies for the H.264 standard. Initially, requirements to enforce DRM are analyzed and understood. Based on these requirements, a framework is constructed which puts forth different possibilities that can be explored to satisfy the objective. To implement computationally efficient DRM methods, watermarking and content based copy detection are then chosen as the preferred methodologies. The first approach is based on robust watermarking which modifies the DC residuals of 4×4 macroblocks within I-frames. Robust watermarks are appropriate for content protection and proving ownership. Experimental results show that the technique exhibits encouraging rate-distortion (R-D) characteristics while at the same time being computationally efficient. The problem of content authentication is addressed with the help of two methodologies: irreversible and reversible watermarks. The first approach utilizes the highest frequency coefficient within 4×4 blocks of the I-frames after CAVLC en- tropy encoding to embed a watermark. The technique was found to be very effect- ive in detecting tampering. The second approach applies the difference expansion (DE) method on IPCM macroblocks within P-frames to embed a high-capacity reversible watermark. Experiments prove the technique to be not only fragile and reversible but also exhibiting minimal variation in its R-D characteristics. The final methodology adopted to enforce DRM for H.264 video is based on the concept of signature generation and matching. Specific types of macroblocks within each predefined region of an I-, B- and P-frame are counted at regular intervals in a video clip and an ordinal matrix is constructed based on their count. The matrix is considered to be the signature of that video clip and is matched with longer video sequences to detect copies within them. Simulation results show that the matching methodology is capable of not only detecting copies but also its location within a longer video sequence. Performance analysis depict acceptable false positive and false negative rates and encouraging receiver operating charac- teristics. Finally, the time taken to match and locate copies is significantly low which makes it ideal for use in broadcast and streaming applications

Perceptual Video Hashing for Content Identification and Authentication

Perceptual hashing has been broadly used in the literature to identify similar contents for video copy detection. It has also been adopted to detect malicious manipulations for video authentication. However, targeting both applications with a single system using the same hash would be highly desirable as this saves the storage space and reduces the computational complexity. This paper proposes a perceptual video hashing system for content identification and authentication. The objective is to design a hash extraction technique that can withstand signal processing operations on one hand and detect malicious attacks on the other hand. The proposed system relies on a new signal calibration technique for extracting the hash using the discrete cosine transform (DCT) and the discrete sine transform (DST). This consists of determining the number of samples, called the normalizing shift, that is required for shifting a digital signal so that the shifted version matches a certain pattern according to DCT/DST coefficients. The rationale for the calibration idea is that the normalizing shift resists signal processing operations while it exhibits sensitivity to local tampering (i.e., replacing a small portion of the signal with a different one). While the same hash serves both applications, two different similarity measures have been proposed for video identification and authentication, respectively. Through intensive experiments with various types of video distortions and manipulations, the proposed system has been shown to outperform related state-of-the art video hashing techniques in terms of identification and authentication with the advantageous ability to locate tampered regions

Content Fragile Watermarking for H.264/AVC Video Authentication

Discrete Cosine transform (DCT) to generate the authentication data that are treated as a fragile watermark. This watermark is embedded in the motion vectors (MVs) The advances in multimedia technologies and digital processing tools have brought with them new challenges for the source and content authentication. To ensure the integrity of the H.264/AVC video stream, we introduce an approach based on a content fragile video watermarking method using an independent authentication of each Group of Pictures (GOPs) within the video. This technique uses robust visual features extracted from the video pertaining to the set of selected macroblocs (MBs) which hold the best partition mode in a tree-structured motion compensation process. An additional security degree is offered by the proposed method through using a more secured keyed function HMAC-SHA-256 and randomly choosing candidates from already selected MBs. In here, the watermark detection and verification processes are blind, whereas the tampered frames detection is not since it needs the original frames within the tampered GOPs. The proposed scheme achieves an accurate authentication technique with a high fragility and fidelity whilst maintaining the original bitrate and the perceptual quality. Furthermore, its ability to detect the tampered frames in case of spatial, temporal and colour manipulations, is confirmed

New Anomaly Network Intrusion Detection System in Cloud Environment Based on Optimized Back Propagation Neural Network Using Improved Genetic Algorithm

Cloud computing is distributed architecture, providing computing facilities and storage resource as a service over an open environment (Internet), this lead to different matters related to the security and privacy in cloud computing. Thus, defending network accessible Cloud resources and services from various threats and attacks is of great concern. To address this issue, it is essential to create an efficient and effective Network Intrusion System (NIDS) to detect both outsider and insider intruders with high detection precision in the cloud environment. NIDS has become popular as an important component of the network security infrastructure, which detects malicious activities by monitoring network traffic. In this work, we propose to optimize a very popular soft computing tool widely used for intrusion detection namely, Back Propagation Neural Network (BPNN) using an Improved Genetic Algorithm (IGA). Genetic Algorithm (GA) is improved through optimization strategies, namely Parallel Processing and Fitness Value Hashing, which reduce execution time, convergence time and save processing power. Since,  Learning rate and Momentum term are among the most relevant parameters that impact the performance of BPNN classifier, we have employed IGA to find the optimal or near-optimal values of these two parameters which ensure high detection rate, high accuracy and low false alarm rate. The CloudSim simulator 4.0 and DARPA’s KDD cup datasets 1999 are used for simulation. From the detailed performance analysis, it is clear that the proposed system called “ANIDS BPNN-IGA” (Anomaly NIDS based on BPNN and IGA) outperforms several state-of-art methods and it is more suitable for network anomaly detection

Digital Watermarking for Verification of Perception-based Integrity of Audio Data

In certain application fields digital audio recordings contain sensitive content. Examples are historical archival material in public archives that preserve our cultural heritage, or digital evidence in the context of law enforcement and civil proceedings. Because of the powerful capabilities of modern editing tools for multimedia such material is vulnerable to doctoring of the content and forgery of its origin with malicious intent. Also inadvertent data modification and mistaken origin can be caused by human error. Hence, the credibility and provenience in terms of an unadulterated and genuine state of such audio content and the confidence about its origin are critical factors. To address this issue, this PhD thesis proposes a mechanism for verifying the integrity and authenticity of digital sound recordings. It is designed and implemented to be insensitive to common post-processing operations of the audio data that influence the subjective acoustic perception only marginally (if at all). Examples of such operations include lossy compression that maintains a high sound quality of the audio media, or lossless format conversions. It is the objective to avoid de facto false alarms that would be expectedly observable in standard crypto-based authentication protocols in the presence of these legitimate post-processing. For achieving this, a feasible combination of the techniques of digital watermarking and audio-specific hashing is investigated. At first, a suitable secret-key dependent audio hashing algorithm is developed. It incorporates and enhances so-called audio fingerprinting technology from the state of the art in contentbased audio identification. The presented algorithm (denoted as ”rMAC” message authentication code) allows ”perception-based” verification of integrity. This means classifying integrity breaches as such not before they become audible. As another objective, this rMAC is embedded and stored silently inside the audio media by means of audio watermarking technology. This approach allows maintaining the authentication code across the above-mentioned admissible post-processing operations and making it available for integrity verification at a later date. For this, an existent secret-key ependent audio watermarking algorithm is used and enhanced in this thesis work. To some extent, the dependency of the rMAC and of the watermarking processing from a secret key also allows authenticating the origin of a protected audio. To elaborate on this security aspect, this work also estimates the brute-force efforts of an adversary attacking this combined rMAC-watermarking approach. The experimental results show that the proposed method provides a good distinction and classification performance of authentic versus doctored audio content. It also allows the temporal localization of audible data modification within a protected audio file. The experimental evaluation finally provides recommendations about technical configuration settings of the combined watermarking-hashing approach. Beyond the main topic of perception-based data integrity and data authenticity for audio, this PhD work provides new general findings in the fields of audio fingerprinting and digital watermarking. The main contributions of this PhD were published and presented mainly at conferences about multimedia security. These publications were cited by a number of other authors and hence had some impact on their works

Task-specific and interpretable feature learning

Deep learning models have had tremendous impacts in recent years, while a question has been raised by many: Is deep learning just a triumph of empiricism? There has been emerging interest in reducing the gap between the theoretical soundness and interpretability, and the empirical success of deep models. This dissertation provides a comprehensive discussion on bridging traditional model-based learning approaches that emphasize problem-specific reasoning, and deep models that allow for larger learning capacity. The overall goal is to devise the next-generation feature learning architectures that are: 1) task-specific, namely, optimizing the entire pipeline from end to end while taking advantage of available prior knowledge and domain expertise; and 2) interpretable, namely, being able to learn a representation consisting of semantically sensible variables, and to display predictable behaviors. This dissertation starts by showing how the classical sparse coding models could be improved in a task-specific way, by formulating the entire pipeline as bi-level optimization. Then, it mainly illustrates how to incorporate the structure of classical learning models, e.g., sparse coding, into the design of deep architectures. A few concrete model examples are presented, ranging from the $\ell_0$ and $\ell_1$ sparse approximation models, to the $\ell_\infty$ constrained model and the dual-sparsity model. The analytic tools in the optimization problems can be translated to guide the architecture design and performance analysis of deep models. As a result, those customized deep models demonstrate improved performance, intuitive interpretation, and efficient parameter initialization. On the other hand, deep networks are shown to be analogous to brain mechanisms. They exhibit the ability to describe semantic content from the primitive level to the abstract level. This dissertation thus also presents a preliminary investigation of the synergy between feature learning with cognitive science and neuroscience. Two novel application domains, image aesthetics assessment and brain encoding, are explored, with promising preliminary results achieved