Contextual biometric watermarking of fingerprint images

This research presents contextual digital watermarking techniques using face and demographic text data as multiple watermarks for protecting the evidentiary integrity of fingerprint image. The proposed techniques embed the watermarks into selected regions of fingerprint image in MDCT and DWT domains. A general image watermarking algorithm is developed to investigate the application of MDCT in the elimination of blocking artifacts. The application of MDCT has improved the performance of the watermarking technique compared to DCT. Experimental results show that modifications to fingerprint image are visually imperceptible and maintain the minutiae detail. The integrity of the fingerprint image is verified through high matching score obtained from the AFIS system. There is also a high degree of correlation between the embedded and extracted watermarks. The degree of similarity is computed using pixel-based metrics and human visual system metrics. It is useful for personal identification and establishing digital chain of custody. The results also show that the proposed watermarking technique is resilient to common image modifications that occur during electronic fingerprint transmission

Entropy Based Robust Watermarking Algorithm

Tänu aina kasvavale multimeedia andmeedastus mahtudele Internetis, on esile kerkinud mured turvalisusest ja piraatlusest. Digitaalse meedia paljundamise ja muutmise maht on loonud vajaduse digitaalse meedia vesimärgistamise järgi. Selles töös on tutvustatud vastupidavaid vesimärkide lisamise algoritme, mis lisavad vesimärgid madala entroopiaga pildi osadesse. Välja pakutud algoritmides jagatakse algne pilt blokkidesse ning arvutatakse iga bloki entroopia. Kõikide blokkide keskmine entroopia väärtus valitakse künniseks, mille järgi otsustatakse, millistesse blokkidesse vesimärk lisada. Kõik blokid, mille entroopia on väiksem kui künnis, viiakse signaali sageduse kujule kasutades Discrete Wavelet Transform algoritmi. Madala sagedusega sagedusvahemikule rakendatakse Chirp Z-Transform algoritmi ja saadud tulemusele LU-dekompositsiooni või QR-dekompositsiooni. Singular Value Decomposition meetodi rakendamisel diagonaalmaatriksile, mis saadi eelmisest sammust, saadakse iga bloki vastav väärtus. Vesimärk lisatakse pildile, liites iga bloki arvutatud väärtusele vesimärgi Singular Value Decomposition meetodi tulemused. Kirjeldatud algoritme testiti ning võrreldi teiste tavapärast ning uudsete vesimärkide lisamise tehnoloogiatega. Kvantitatiivsed ja kvalitatiivsed eksperimendid näitavad, et välja pakutud meetodid on tajumatud ning vastupidavad signaali töötlemise rünnakutele.With growth of digital media distributed over the Internet, concerns about security and piracy have emerged. The amount of digital media reproduction and tampering has brought a need for content watermarking. In this work, multiple robust watermarking algorithms are introduced. They embed watermark image into singular values of host image’s blocks with low entropy values. In proposed algorithms, host image is divided into blocks, and the entropy of each block is calculated. The average of all entropies indicates the chosen threshold value for selecting the blocks in which watermark image should be embedded. All blocks with entropy lower than the calculated threshold are decomposed into frequency subbands using discrete wavelet transform (DWT). Subsequently chirp z-transform (CZT) is applied to the low-frequency subband followed by an appropriate matrix decomposition such as lower and upper decomposition (LUD) or orthogonal-triangular decomposition (QR decomposition). By applying singular value decomposition (SVD) to diagonal matrices obtained by the aforementioned matrix decompositions, the singular values of each block are calculated. Watermark image is embedded by adding singular values of the watermark image to singular values of the low entropy blocks. Proposed algorithms are tested on many host and watermark images, and they are compared with conventional and other state-of-the-art watermarking techniques. The quantitative and qualitative experimental results are indicating that the proposed algorithms are imperceptible and robust against many signal processing attacks

Forensic Analysis of Digital Image Tampering

The use of digital photography has increased over the past few years, a trend which opens the door for new and creative ways to forge images. The manipulation of images through forgery influences the perception an observer has of the depicted scene, potentially resulting in ill consequences if created with malicious intentions. This poses a need to verify the authenticity of images originating from unknown sources in absence of any prior digital watermarking or authentication technique. This research explores the holes left by existing research; specifically, the ability to detect image forgeries created using multiple image sources and specialized methods tailored to the popular JPEG image format. In an effort to meet these goals, this thesis presents four methods to detect image tampering based on fundamental image attributes common to any forgery. These include discrepancies in 1) lighting and 2) brightness levels, 3) underlying edge inconsistencies, and 4) anomalies in JPEG compression blocks. Overall, these methods proved encouraging in detecting image forgeries with an observed accuracy of 60% in a completely blind experiment containing a mixture of 15 authentic and forged images

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

Robust watermarking for magnetic resonance images with automatic region of interest detection

Medical image watermarking requires special considerations compared to ordinary watermarking methods. The first issue is the detection of an important area of the image called the Region of Interest (ROI) prior to starting the watermarking process. Most existing ROI detection procedures use manual-based methods, while in automated methods the robustness against intentional or unintentional attacks has not been considered extensively. The second issue is the robustness of the embedded watermark against different attacks. A common drawback of existing watermarking methods is their weakness against salt and pepper noise. The research carried out in this thesis addresses these issues of having automatic ROI detection for magnetic resonance images that are robust against attacks particularly the salt and pepper noise and designing a new watermarking method that can withstand high density salt and pepper noise. In the ROI detection part, combinations of several algorithms such as morphological reconstruction, adaptive thresholding and labelling are utilized. The noise-filtering algorithm and window size correction block are then introduced for further enhancement. The performance of the proposed ROI detection is evaluated by computing the Comparative Accuracy (CA). In the watermarking part, a combination of spatial method, channel coding and noise filtering schemes are used to increase the robustness against salt and pepper noise. The quality of watermarked image is evaluated using Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), and the accuracy of the extracted watermark is assessed in terms of Bit Error Rate (BER). Based on experiments, the CA under eight different attacks (speckle noise, average filter, median filter, Wiener filter, Gaussian filter, sharpening filter, motion, and salt and pepper noise) is between 97.8% and 100%. The CA under different densities of salt and pepper noise (10%-90%) is in the range of 75.13% to 98.99%. In the watermarking part, the performance of the proposed method under different densities of salt and pepper noise measured by total PSNR, ROI PSNR, total SSIM and ROI SSIM has improved in the ranges of 3.48-23.03 (dB), 3.5-23.05 (dB), 0-0.4620 and 0-0.5335 to 21.75-42.08 (dB), 20.55-40.83 (dB), 0.5775-0.8874 and 0.4104-0.9742 respectively. In addition, the BER is reduced to the range of 0.02% to 41.7%. To conclude, the proposed method has managed to significantly improve the performance of existing medical image watermarking methods

Numerical Simulation and Design of Copy Move Image Forgery Detection Using ORB and K Means Algorithm

Copy-move is a common technique for tampering with images in the digital realm. Therefore, image security authentication is of critical importance in our society. So copy move forgery detection (CMFD) is activated in order to identify the forged portion of a photograph. A combination of the Scaled ORB and the k-means++ algorithm is used to identify this object. The first step is to identify the space on a pyramid scale, which is critical for the next step. A region's defining feature is critical to its detection. Because of this, the ORB descriptor plays an important role. Extracting FAST key points and ORB features from each scale space. The coordinates of the FAST key points have been reversed in relation to the original image. The ORB descriptors are now subjected to the k-means++ algorithm. Hammering distance is used to match the clustered features every two key points. Then, the forged key points are discovered. This information is used to draw two circles on the forged and original regions. Moment must be calculated if the forged region is rotational invariant. Geometric transformation (scaling and rotation) is possible in this method. For images that have been rotated and smoothed, this work demonstrates a method for detecting the forged region. The running time of the proposed method is less than that of the previous method

Verification approach for medical data in e-healthcare system based on biometric and watermarking

Medical information is crucial in the healthcare system, and its manipulation can lead to misdiagnosis. Medical images also contain personal information for patients; hence, information security and privacy protection are paramount when transferring medical images over the Internet. Biometric approach and watermarking techniques are used to achieve this purpose. The focus of this paper was on a biometric watermarking system with a frequency domain in which the sender's iris code is employed as a sender authentication key. The privacy of the patient's information is preserved by encrypting it and embedding the key in the cover medical image created by the Discrete Wavelet Transform. The algorithm has shown that the proposed system has met previous requirements

Image Tamper Detection and Recovery by Intersecting Signatures

In this paper, we propose an exact image authentication scheme that can, in the best case, detect image tampering with the accuracy of one pixel. This method is based on constructing blocks in the image in such a manner that they intersect with one another in different directions. Such a technique is very useful to identify whether an individual image pixel has been tampered with. Moreover, the tampered region can be well recovered with the embedded recover data