A Survey on Biometrics based Digital Image Watermarking Techniques and Applications

The improvements in Internet technologies and growing demands on online multimedia businesses have made digital copyrighting as a major challenge for businesses that are associated with online content distribution via diverse business models including pay-per-view subscription trading etc Copyright protection and the evidence for rightful ownership are major issues associated with the distribution of any digital images Digital watermarking is a probable solution for digital content owners that offer security to the digital content In recent years digital watermarking plays a vital role in providing the apposite solution and numerous researches have been carried out In this paper an extensive review of the prevailing literature related to the Bio- watermarking is presented together with classification by utilizing an assortment of techniques In addition a terse introduction about the Digital Watermarking is presented to get acquainted with the vital information on the subject of Digital Watermarkin

Fingerprint Authentication by Wavelet-based Digital Watermarking

In this manuscript, a wavelet-based blind watermarking scheme has been proposed as a means to provide protection against false matching of a possibly tampered fingerprint by embedding a binary name label of the fingerprint owner in the fingerprint itself. Embedding watermarks in the detail regions allow us to increase the robustness of our watermark, at little to no additional impact on image quality. It has been experimentally shown that when a binary watermark is embedded into detail coefficients of an indexed fingerprint image in a spread spectrum fashion, the perceptual invisibility and robustness have anticlinal response to change in amplification factor “K” and smaller watermarks have better transparency than the larger ones. The DWT-based technique has been found to give better robustness against noises, geometrical distortions, filtering and JPEG compression attack than other frequency domain watermarking techniques.DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.11591/ijece.v2i4.50

Hybrid multiple watermarking technique for securing medical images of modalities MRI, CT scan, and X-ray

In order to contribute to the security of sharing and transferring medical images, we had presented a multiple watermarking technique for multiple protections; it was based on the combination of three transformations: the discrete wavelet transform (DWT), the fast Walsh-Hadamard transform (FWHT) and, the singular value decomposition (SVD). In this paper, three watermark images of sizes 512x 512 were inserted into a single medical image of various modalities such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT), and X-Radiation (X-ray). After applying DWT up to the third level on the original image, the high-resolution sub-bands were being selected subsequently to apply FWHT and then SVD. The singular values of the three watermark images were inserted into the singular values of the cover medical image. The experimental results showed the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of quality and robustness compared to other reported techniques cited in the literature

Region-Based Watermarking of Biometric Images: Case Study in Fingerprint Images

In this paper, a novel scheme to watermark biometric images is proposed. It exploits the fact that biometric images, normally, have one region of interest, which represents the relevant part of information processable by most of the biometric-based identification/authentication systems. This proposed scheme consists of embedding the watermark into the region of interest only; thus, preserving the hidden data from the segmentation process that removes the useless background and keeps the region of interest unaltered; a process which can be used by an attacker as a cropping attack. Also, it provides more robustness and better imperceptibility of the embedded watermark. The proposed scheme is introduced into the optimum watermark detection in order to improve its performance. It is applied to fingerprint images, one of the most widely used and studied biometric data. The watermarking is assessed in two well-known transform domains: the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and the discrete Fourier transform (DFT). The results obtained are very attractive and clearly show significant improvements when compared to the standard technique, which operates on the whole image. The results also reveal that the segmentation (cropping) attack does not affect the performance of the proposed technique, which also shows more robustness against other common attacks

Are Social Networks Watermarking Us or Are We (Unawarely) Watermarking Ourself?

In the last decade, Social Networks (SNs) have deeply changed many aspects of society, and one of the most widespread behaviours is the sharing of pictures. However, malicious users often exploit shared pictures to create fake profiles leading to the growth of cybercrime. Thus, keeping in mind this scenario, authorship attribution and verification through image watermarking techniques are becoming more and more important. In this paper, firstly, we investigate how 13 most popular SNs treat the uploaded pictures, in order to identify a possible implementation of image watermarking techniques by respective SNs. Secondly, on these 13 SNs, we test the robustness of several image watermarking algorithms. Finally, we verify whether a method based on the Photo-Response Non-Uniformity (PRNU) technique can be successfully used as a watermarking approach for authorship attribution and verification of pictures on SNs. The proposed method is robust enough in spite of the fact that the pictures get downgraded during the uploading process by SNs. The results of our analysis on a real dataset of 8,400 pictures show that the proposed method is more effective than other watermarking techniques and can help to address serious questions about privacy and security on SNs.Comment: 43 pages, 6 figure

Are Social Networks Watermarking Us or Are We (Unawarely) Watermarking Ourself?

In the last decade, Social Networks (SNs) have deeply changed many aspects of society, and one of the most widespread behaviours is the sharing of pictures. However, malicious users often exploit shared pictures to create fake profiles, leading to the growth of cybercrime. Thus, keeping in mind this scenario, authorship attribution and verification through image watermarking techniques are becoming more and more important. In this paper, we firstly investigate how thirteen of the most popular SNs treat uploaded pictures in order to identify a possible implementation of image watermarking techniques by respective SNs. Second, we test the robustness of several image watermarking algorithms on these thirteen SNs. Finally, we verify whether a method based on the Photo-Response Non-Uniformity (PRNU) technique, which is usually used in digital forensic or image forgery detection activities, can be successfully used as a watermarking approach for authorship attribution and verification of pictures on SNs. The proposed method is sufficiently robust, in spite of the fact that pictures are often downgraded during the process of uploading to the SNs. Moreover, in comparison to conventional watermarking methods the proposed method can successfully pass through different SNs, solving related problems such as profile linking and fake profile detection. The results of our analysis on a real dataset of 8400 pictures show that the proposed method is more effective than other watermarking techniques and can help to address serious questions about privacy and security on SNs. Moreover, the proposed method paves the way for the definition of multi-factor online authentication mechanisms based on robust digital features

Design a system for an approved video copyright over cloud based on biometric iris and random walk generator using watermark technique

Copyright is a tool for preventing anyone forged to copy an electronic work from another person and claim that electronic work is referred to him. Since the identity of the person is always determined by his name and biometrics, there is a concern to handle this information, to preserve the copyright. In this paper, a new idea for copyright technology is used to prove video copyright, by using blind watermarking technique, the ownership information is hidden inside video frames using linear congruential generator (LCG) for adapted the locations of vector features extracted from the name and biometric image of the owner instead of hidden the watermark in the Pseudo Noise sequences or any other feature extraction technique. When providing the watermarked vector, a statistical operation is used to increase randomization state for the amplifier factors of LCG function. LCG provides random positions where the owner's information is stored inside the video. The proposed method is not difficult to execute and can present an adaptable imperceptibility and robustness performance. The output results show the robustness of this approach based on the average PSNR of frames for the embedded in 50 frames is around 47.5 dB while the watermark remains undetectable. MSSIM values with range (0.83 to 0.99)

Iris Biometric Watermarking for Authentication Using Multiband Discrete Wavelet Transform and Singular-Value Decomposition

The most advanced technology, watermarking enables intruders to access the database. Various techniques have been developed for information security. Watermarks and histories are linked to many biometric techniques such as fingerprints, palm positions, gait, iris and speech are recommended. Digital watermarking is the utmost successful approaches among the methods available. In this paper the multiband wavelet transforms and singular value decomposition are discussed to establish a watermarking strategy rather than biometric information. The use of biometrics instead of conservative watermarks can enhance information protection. The biometric technology being used is iris. The iris template can be viewed as a watermark, while an iris mode of communication may be used to help information security with the addition of a watermark to the image of the iris. The research involves verifying authentication against different attacks such as no attacks, Jpeg Compression, Gaussian, Median Filtering and Blurring. The Algorithm increases durability and resilience when exposed to geometric and frequency attacks. Finally, the proposed framework can be applied not only to the assessment of iris biometrics, but also to other areas where privacy is critical

A Study of Image Fingerprinting by Using Visual Cryptography

As digital media has made our life more colourful because of its advantages like easier to access, copy and distribute. But as what we have seen, series of malice activities like copyright infringement, counterfeiting, piracy and information distortion make damages to both the producers and the users of digital products. So we really need some technology to protect the copyright, authenticity, integrity of the digital products and the intellectual property of the users. There are many techniques such as Digital watermarking and Visual Cryptography both have been widely used for protection of data either in text, video, sound or digital images form in modern network time. Digital watermarking is an evolving field that requires continuous effort to find for the best possible method in protecting multimedia content. But Visual Cryptography is a special encryption technique to hide information in images in such a way that it can be decrypted by the human vision if the correct key image is used. Both techniques addresses the growing concerns of theft and tampering of digital media through the use of advanced signal processing strategies to embed copyright and authentication information within media content in their respective manner. In this paper we have discussed image fingerprinting with the help of visual cryptography technique. Keywords: Authentication, Digital Media, Digital Watermarking, Fingerprinting, Image, Piracy, Visual Cryptograph

Application of Stochastic Diffusion for Hiding High Fidelity Encrypted Images

Cryptography coupled with information hiding has received increased attention in recent years and has become a major research theme because of the importance of protecting encrypted information in any Electronic Data Interchange system in a way that is both discrete and covert. One of the essential limitations in any cryptography system is that the encrypted data provides an indication on its importance which arouses suspicion and makes it vulnerable to attack. Information hiding of Steganography provides a potential solution to this issue by making the data imperceptible, the security of the hidden information being a threat only if its existence is detected through Steganalysis. This paper focuses on a study methods for hiding encrypted information, specifically, methods that encrypt data before embedding in host data where the ‘data’ is in the form of a full colour digital image. Such methods provide a greater level of data security especially when the information is to be submitted over the Internet, for example, since a potential attacker needs to first detect, then extract and then decrypt the embedded data in order to recover the original information. After providing an extensive survey of the current methods available, we present a new method of encrypting and then hiding full colour images in three full colour host images with out loss of fidelity following data extraction and decryption. The application of this technique, which is based on a technique called ‘Stochastic Diffusion’ are wide ranging and include covert image information interchange, digital image authentication, video authentication, copyright protection and digital rights management of image data in general