A Survey on Recent Reversible Watermarking Techniques

Watermarking is a technique to protect the copyright of digital media such as image, text, music and movie. Reversible watermarking is a technique in which watermark can be removed to completely restore the original image. Reversible watermarking of digital content allows full extraction of the watermark along with the complete restoration of the original image. For the last few years, reversible watermarking techniques are gaining popularity due to its applications in important and sensitive areas like military communication, healthcare, and law-enforcement. Due to the rapid evolution of reversible watermarking techniques, a latest review of recent research in this field is highly desirable. In this survey, the performances of different latest reversible watermarking techniques are discussed on the basis of various characteristics of watermarking

Protection of medical images and patient related information in healthcare: Using an intelligent and reversible watermarking technique

This work presents an intelligent technique based on reversible watermarking for protecting patient and medical related information. In the proposed technique ‘IRW-Med’, the concept of companding function is exploited for reducing embedding distortion, while Integer Wavelet Transform (IWT) is used as an embedding domain for achieving reversibility. Histogram processing is employed to avoid underflow/overflow. In addition, the learning capabilities of Genetic Programming (GP) are exploited for intelligent wavelet coefficient selection. In this context, GP is used to evolve models that not only make an optimal tradeoff between imperceptibility and capacity of the watermark, but also exploit the wavelet coefficient hidden dependencies and information related to the type of sub band. The novelty of the proposed IRW-Med technique lies in its ability to generate a model that can find optimal wavelet coefficients for embedding, and also acts as a companding factor for watermark embedding. The proposed IRW-Med is thus able to embed watermark with low distortion, take out the hidden information, and also recovers the original image. The proposed IRW-Med technique is effective with respect to capacity and imperceptibility and effectiveness is demonstrated through experimental comparisons with existing techniques using standard images as well as a publically available medical image dataset

Implementation of Reversible Data Hiding Using Suitable Wavelet Transform For Controlled Contrast Enhancement

Data Hiding is important for secrete communication and it is also essential to keep the data hidden to be received by the intended recipient only. The conventional Reversible Data Hiding (RDH) algorithms pursue high Peak-Signal-to-Noise-Ratio (PSNR) at certain amount of embedding bits. Considering an importance of improvement in image visual quality than keeping high PSNR, a novel RDH scheme utilizing contrast enhancement to replace the PSNR was presented with the help of Integer Wavelet Transform (IWT). In proposed work, the identification of suitable transform from different wavelet families is planned to enhance the security of data by encrypting it and embedding more bits with the original image to generate stego image. The obtained stego image will be transmitted to the other end, where the receiver will extract the transmitted secrete data and original cover image from stego image using required keys. It will use a proper transformation for the purpose of Controlled Contrast Enhancement (CCE) to achieve the intended RDH so that the amount of embedding data bits and visual perception will be enhanced. The difference of the transmitted original image and restored original image is minor, which is almost invisible for human eyes though more bits are embedded with the original image. The performance parameters are also calculated

Design and Analysis of Reversible Data Hiding Using Hybrid Cryptographic and Steganographic approaches for Multiple Images

Data concealing is the process of including some helpful information on images. The majority of sensitive applications, such sending authentication data, benefit from data hiding. Reversible data hiding (RDH), also known as invertible or lossless data hiding in the field of signal processing, has been the subject of a lot of study. A piece of data that may be recovered from an image to disclose the original image is inserted into the image during the RDH process to generate a watermarked image. Lossless data hiding is being investigated as a strong and popular way to protect copyright in many sensitive applications, such as law enforcement, medical diagnostics, and remote sensing. Visible and invisible watermarking are the two types of watermarking algorithms. The watermark must be bold and clearly apparent in order to be visible. To be utilized for invisible watermarking, the watermark must be robust and visibly transparent. Reversible data hiding (RDH) creates a marked signal by encoding a piece of data into the host signal. Once the embedded data has been recovered, the original signal may be accurately retrieved. For photos shot in poor illumination, visual quality is more important than a high PSNR number. The DH method increases the contrast of the host picture while maintaining a high PSNR value. Histogram equalization may also be done concurrently by repeating the embedding process in order to relocate the top two bins in the input image's histogram for data embedding. It's critical to assess the images after data concealment to see how much the contrast has increased. Common picture quality assessments include peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), relative structural similarity (RSS), relative mean brightness error (RMBE), relative entropy error (REE), relative contrast error (RCE), and global contrast factor (GCF). The main objective of this paper is to investigate the various quantitative metrics for evaluating contrast enhancement. The results show that the visual quality may be preserved by including a sufficient number of message bits in the input photographs