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This paper reports on a survey detailing the watermarks of some copies of the ‘Head’ edition of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651). Two copies of the Head edition at the Nagoya University Library in Japan were examined -- a copy of the Osaka University of Economics Library (Call mark: RB206 || 133.23) and another copy of the British Library (Shelfmark: 522 .k.6). Presently, the former copy is the only book other than the one at the Nagoya University Library wherein Japan The in the first line is printed in Roman capitals along with a misprinted B at the bottom on Leaf A4. The survey reveals two points clearly: 1) Two types of watermarks of the ‘Post or Pillar’ design were identified in Leviathan, and these sheets were used in many parts of the book. 2) It is highly likely that sheets with a ‘Pot’ watermark design were used in the second half of the printing process in the latter part. Therefore, there is room for various considerations regarding the quires on which this ʻPotʼ design was used in the first half of Leviathan. This study also confirms that the page number on p. 171 of the British Library copy were handwritten.

Watermarking images is essential for several reasons like security, validation etc. The extracted watermark should have similar characteristics as that of the watermark image embedded during the watermarking process. Also, it is important that the watermark image should not differ the features of the host image after embedding. In order conceive this features, it is important to have a technique of watermarking. In this paper, such an attempt has been made to incorporate the novel techniques of watermarking using single value decomposition (SVD), discrete wavelet transformation (DWT) and social group optimization algorithm (SGOA). The simulation-based experiment has been carried out to evaluate the performance of the technique in terms of structural similarity index (SSI). The Matlab environment is used for the simulations.

In this paper, the effect of the protan recoloring algorithm on an image with an inserted watermarkis analyzed. In addition, the effect of degradation of the quality of the recolored image due to the insertion ofwatermarks and superimposed AWGN was also analyzed. In the first part of the paper, the effect of color visiondeficiency, as a consequence of anomalies in L cones, which is designated as protanomaly (protanopia), isdescribed. People with protanopia do not see a wide range of colors because the colors from the L channel aremissing. After that, the recoloring algorithm, which performs recoloring of the image, so that, in protan persons,the visible spectrum of colors is expanded, is described. Then, the algorithm for inserting a watermark, in orderto protect copyrights, is described. In the second part of the work, the Experiment, in which the quality of therecoloring image was tested, as well as the quality of the extracted watermark, was described. The results of theexperiment are shown with pictures and tables. By applying a comparative analysis of the results of theexperiment, using objective (MSE, PSNR, NC and SSIM) and subjective (visual inspection) methods, theinsertion factor of the watermark, α, which preserves the quality of the recoloring image as well as the quality ofthe extracted watermark, was determined. Visual inspection determined the SNR at which visible imagedegradation and watermarks occur.

With the advent of cloud computing, explosively increasing images are gradually outsourced to the cloud server for costs saving and feasibility. For security and privacy concerns, images (e.g., medical diagnosis, personal photos) should be encrypted before being outsourced. However, traditional encrypted image retrieval techniques still suffer from costly access control and low search accuracy. To solve these challenging issues, in this paper, we first propose a Controllable encrypted cloud image Search scheme in Multi-user settings (namely CSM) by using the polynomial-based access strategy and proxy re-encryption technique. CSM achieves efficient access control and avoids heavy communication overhead caused by key transmission. Then, we improve the basic CSM to achieve malicious search user Tracing (namely TCSM) by utilizing the watermark technique, which can further prevent search users from illegally redistributing retrieved images to unauthorized search users. Our formal security analysis proves that our CSM (or TCSM) can guarantee the privacy of images, indexes, and search queries. Our empirical experiments using real-world datasets demonstrate the efficiency and high accuracy of our CSM (or TCSM) in practice.

With substantial amount of time, resources and human (team) efforts invested to explore and develop successful deep neural networks (DNN), there emerges an urgent need to protect these inventions from being illegally copied, redistributed, or abused without respecting the intellectual properties of legitimate owners. Following recent progresses along this line, we investigate a number of watermark-based DNN ownership verification methods in the face of ambiguity attacks, which aim to cast doubts on the ownership verification by forging counterfeit watermarks. It is shown that ambiguity attacks pose serious threats to existing DNN watermarking methods. As remedies to the above-mentioned loophole, this paper proposes novel passport-based DNN ownership verification schemes which are both robust to network modifications and resilient to ambiguity attacks. The gist of embedding digital passports is to design and train DNN models in a way such that, the DNN inference performance of an original task will be significantly deteriorated due to forged passports. In other words, genuine passports are not only verified by looking for the predefined signatures, but also reasserted by the unyielding DNN model inference performances. Extensive experimental results justify the effectiveness of the proposed passport-based DNN ownership verification schemes. Code is available at https://github.com/kamwoh/DeepIPR.

To enhance the conventional LSB technique of digital image watermarking, the paper introduces a novel approach of LSB technique based on matrix multiplication process. This technique selects the non-consecutive matrix of pixels to replace the last three bits of each RGB components of cover image by watermark image. The filtering process is applied on each block of matrix to select the suitable block for embedding process. Extraction process of watermark is just the reverse of the embedding process. The non-uniform substitution of bits makes the system more vigorous in terms of robustness, imperceptibility and security. Although the proposed method is non blind type of digital watermarking, the original image is required at destination side for the extraction process. MATLAB tool is used for the evaluation of the proposed system. The strength of the given methodology is highlighted by experimental results and tabulated for statistical attacks. This technique is suitable for content authentication and copyright protection applications.

Digital data sharing is increased day by day due to the rapid access of the Internet by mass people. Multimedia, for example text, image, video, and audio can be easily accessed by unauthorized users. To ensure multimedia security, researchers are focusing on digital image watermarking. A robust watermarking system must satisfy the basic design requirements like imperceptibility, robustness, security, and payload capacity. Watermarking can be embedded into a host image through different transform operations, such as discrete cosine transform (DCT), discrete wavelet transform (DWT), and singular value decomposition (SVD). However, a single transformation does not ensure all the design requirements simultaneously. To fill this gap, a hybrid blind digital image watermarking with a combination of DCT, DWT, and SVD is proposed in this paper. At first, the Arnold map is used to encrypt the watermark image. Then DCT is applied to it and to the host image followed by DWT before SVD. After that, the watermarked image is generated by embedding the watermark image into the host image. The performance is evaluated under various attacks and experimental results show that our algorithm ensures improved robustness while preserving high imperceptibility and enhanced security than the state-of-the-art methods.

This paper introduces the Watermark Imaging System (WImSy) which can be used to photograph, document, and study sheets of paper. The WImSy provides surface images, raking light images, and transmitted light images of the paper, all in perfect alignment. We develop algorithms that exploit this alignment by combining several images together in a process that mimics both the “surface image removal” technique and the method of “high dynamic range” photographs. An improved optimization criterion and an automatic parameter selection procedure streamline the process and make it practical for art historians and conservators to extract the relevant information to study watermarks. The effectiveness of the method is demonstrated in several experiments on images taken with the WImSy at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the results are compared with manually optimized images.

Fusing the single modality medical images to obtain a distinct multimodality image is needed to ensure a better clinical experience. However, the distribution of these fused images brings the issues of ownership and authentication and has attracted many researchers. Presently, large volumes of medical data are stored on cloud platforms. However, outsourcing medical data to this popular platform may introduce security issues. Following this, we introduce a secure data hiding in fused medical image for smart healthcare, since it is also suitable for applications in the cloud. To achieve this, we first create a fused medical image as a cover by nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT). The method, which is based on NSCT, QR, and Schur decomposition, allows concealing the image and electronic patient records (EPR) mark into the fused image. Importantly, EPR watermark includes a hash value of cover is created first and then embedded into the cover via magic cube-based procedure. Finally, the marked image is encrypted using deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), chaotic maps, and a hash function-based encryption scheme. The introduced watermarking scheme has been evaluated using 25 pairs of medical images and several embedding/extracting parameters. Apart from being satisfactorily imperceptible, the proposed work is also robust and secure against well-known signal processing attacks and promising results are obtained when compared with similar techniques. It indicates a considerable improvement in robustness of 66.7% and 99.7% over existing discrete wavelet transform (DWT)-singular value decomposition (SVD)-based watermarking schemes.

Image watermarking commonly involves singular value decomposition (SVD) because of its simplicity and minimal effect on image quality. However, SVD-based image watermarking schemes suffer from some drawbacks such as the false positive problem (FPP), and an undesirable trade-off between vital properties such as imperceptibility, embedding capacity, and robustness. To address these drawbacks, we improve upon the SVD-based color image watermarking by incorporating integer wavelet transform (IWT) and chaotic maps. A grayscale image watermark is decomposed into eight gray levels (bit-planes) before being encrypted and re-ordered by a chaotic sequence. Each encrypted bit-plane is inserted into singular values of the sub-bands of a host image. The embedding process is controlled by chaos-based multiple scaling factors (MSF) which are updated in each embedded bit-plane. The resulting values are involved in generating a hash value at the end of the embedding processes. The hash value is used to overcome FPP issues and improves security. Our findings illustrate the proposed scheme’s robustness, security, imperceptibility, and capacity. It also exhibits excellent robustness against attacks and its performance surpasses a variety of existing schemes. In addition, the proposed scheme is hypersensitive to even the slightest secret key variations.

Visible watermarking offers direct copyright protection to the naked eye using visible pattern superimposed in the host image. However, due to their exposure, the watermark pattern becomes an easy target to remove by malicious entities that generates copyright-free images. Until now, in the scientific literature several semi-automatic visible watermark removal attacks have been proposed, showing enough visual quality of the recovered host image. In this paper, we propose a watermark design based on modified Seam Carving technique to provide robustness against removal attacks including inpainting-based attacks, Independent Component Analysis (ICA)-based attacks, and image matting-based attacks. Robustness against the attacks is measured using common image quality assessments and a watermark visibility assessment based on the Human Visual System (HVS). Experimental results show robustness of the proposed method against above mentioned watermark removal attacks under the most severe situation, in which adversary has the logotype used as a watermark pattern because it is public in Internet. The proposed method can be applied to any visible watermarking algorithms to make them robust against illegal removal attempts, without sacrificing their original functionality, such as reversibility for authorized users.

In the era of multimedia and Internet, the quick response (QR) code helps people obtain information from offline to online quickly. However, the QR code is often limited in many scenarios because of its random and dull appearance. Therefore, this article proposes a novel approach to embed hyperlinks into common images, making the hyperlinks invisible for human eyes but detectable for mobile devices equipped with a camera. Our approach is an end-to-end neural network with an encoder to hide messages and a decoder to extract messages. To maintain the hidden message resilient to cameras, we build a distortion network between the encoder and the decoder to augment the encoded images. The distortion network uses differentiable 3-D rendering operations, which can simulate the distortion introduced by camera imaging in both printing and display scenarios. To maintain the visual attraction of the image with hyperlinks, a loss function conforming to the human visual system (HVS) is used to supervise the training of the encoder. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the previous work on both robustness and quality. Based on the proposed approach, many applications become possible, for example, ``image hyperlinks'' for advertisement on TV, website, or poster, and ``invisible watermark'' for copyright protection on digital resources or product packagings.

Digital image watermarking is the most widely used recognized approach to protect data against piracy. This paper proposes a new blind color image watermarking based on the Walsh Hadamard Transform (WHT). The proposed method subdivides the image into 4 × 4 non-overlapping blocks, which are then transformed using WHT. The color image watermark is embedded in the third and fourth-row WHT coefficients using the proposed technique as a slight change in those rows may not profoundly affect the visual quality of an image. Then the difference of the third and fourth row WHT coefficients of the watermarked image is obtained. The watermark information is extracted using the attained difference value. The performance evaluation of the proposed scheme outperforms in terms of embedding capacity, Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Weighted Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (WPSNR), Normalized cross-correlation (NC), and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) than the conventional watermarking methods. This proposed method provides more robustness against several manipulations and lossy attacks.

In this paper, a digital watermarking technique for ensuring security to an audio signal is presented. The proposed technique is developed by using discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and singular value decomposition (SVD). The proposed technique is executed by incorporating multi-level DWT along with the use of multiple images with different sizes as watermarks. The proposed technique is developed by keeping in mind the distribution of watermark signals’ energy throughout the entire host signal i.e. the watermarks are decentralized over the entire region of the host signal. The proposed technique is robust as experimentally the proposed technique offers PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio) of 196.8105 dB and normalized cross-correlation (NCC) over 0.9.

In this paper, we propose secure plaintext image storage protocols in the cloud environment for image owners managing and controlling their outsourced images. To solve control and privacy issues, conventional schemes suggest outsourcing images in the encrypted form. However, encrypted images lose their usability and visibility. For example, image owners cannot quickly find their stored images in the cloud. The proposed protocols encourage plaintext image storage in the cloud with copyright protection of images, visible display, lossless retrieval and controlled deletion via techniques of homomorphic encryption and digital watermarking. We allow the image owner to embed and remove the watermark in a privacy-preserving way without compromising the security of the original data and the computed results. Moreover, the image owner can securely detect the cloud's dishonest act of not completely deleting an image as required or leaking an image without permission. Compared with existing works, our work achieves more functions. We prove that the proposed work achieves the controllable management of the outsourced plaintext images without privacy leakage to unauthorized parties and demonstrate the utility and the efficiency of our protocols through experimental evaluation.

Video watermarking on the dual tree-complex wavelet (DT CWT) domain is shown to be effective to offer high robustness. Existing DT CWT video watermarking schemes tend to use all the coefficients on the high-pass sub-bands of the DT CWT domain for watermark embedding and detection, which lack of investigating the correlations among different sub-bands and fail to explore the stable coefficients for robust watermarking. In this paper, we propose a novel DT CWT video watermarking scheme by exploring the stable coefficients on joint sub-bands. We first extract a set of candidate coefficients by applying block singular value decomposition (SVD) on the DT CWT domain. Then, we simulate the watermark embedding by modifying the candidate coefficients on each sub-band, from which we identity two pairs of strongly correlated sub-bands termed as the joint sub-bands. The watermark is eventually embedded by modifying the candidate coefficients of the joint sub-bands on a level which is adaptively chosen according to the video resolution. During the watermark detection, we identify and extract a set of stable coefficients from the candidate coefficients of the joint sub-bands to verify the ownership of the video. Extensive experiments demonstrate the advantage of our propose scheme over the latest DT CWT based schemes, which also performs better than the existing non-DT CWT transformed domain video watermarking schemes.

In this paper, a Phase Congruency based digital color image watermarking algorithm is proposed which provides a higher degree of robustness against attacks and excellent imperceptibility. Here, Phase Congruency has been used to detect the local feature regions of the host image and then the watermark has been infused into it using a new technique called ‘Adaptive α-β Blending’. An accurate Human Visual System modeling has been incorporated via Lifting Wavelet Transform to take the full advantage of perceptual watermarking. The coefficients of the α-β blending are selected adaptively based on the Phase Congruency feature map of the host image. Furthermore, the watermark is secured with a cryptographic algorithm called Arnold’s Cat Map to prohibit further eavesdropping. From rigorous testing, results indicate that our approach is robust against various geometric, non-geometric and combined attacks while maintaining a sublime imperceptibility.

Image watermarking technique aims at high imperceptibility of the embedded watermark with minimal distortion in the watermarked images. In frequency-domain, block-based Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) is a popular method which can be improved by different scaling factors. This paper presents an adaptive scaling factor for selected DCT coefficients in image watermarking. The image blocks that have lowest pixel variances are chosen as the embedding locations. The optimal scaling factors for selected DCT coefficients on the middle frequencies are obtained by finding the best quality of images. The embedding process is performed using the obtained scaling factors. The proposed technique was investigated to verify the robustness and imperceptibility against various image-processing attacks. It is proved that our technique achieves higher robustness against noise addition, filter and compression than the existing schemes in most cases. Our technique produces greater imperceptibility than the existing schemes.

Documents often exhibit various forms of degradation, which make it hard to be read and substantially deteriorate the performance of an OCR system. In this paper, we propose an effective end-to-end framework named Document Enhancement Generative Adversarial Networks (DE-GAN) that uses the conditional GANs (cGANs) to restore severely degraded document images. To the best of our knowledge, this practice has not been studied within the context of generative adversarial deep networks. We demonstrate that, in different tasks (document clean up, binarization, deblurring and watermark removal), DE-GAN can produce an enhanced version of the degraded document with a high quality. In addition, our approach provides consistent improvements compared to state-of-the-art methods over the widely used DIBCO 2013, DIBCO 2017 and H-DIBCO 2018 datasets, proving its ability to restore a degraded document image to its ideal condition. The obtained results on a wide variety of degradation reveal the flexibility of the proposed model to be exploited in other document enhancement problems., Accepted in IEEE TPAMI

Due to advancements in the internet and multimedia technologies, unauthorised users can easily modify video content. As a result, video authentication has been established as a viable solution for ensuring multimedia security. We propose a key-frame based video watermarking scheme based on discrete cosine transform (DCT). First, the pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) is used to detect the shot boundaries of the input video. To reduce the difficulties created by traditional video watermarking systems; an entropy measure is employed to detect key-frames from input video. Traditional schemes entail embedding the entire watermark into all frames of the video, which is inefficient and timeconsuming. To improve the security, robustness, and imperceptibility of the proposed video watermarking scheme, speeded up robust feature points are extracted from each key-frame of the shot and used as reference points for embedding and detection of watermark. The embedded watermark is extracted blindly without using the original data during the extraction process. The results of the experiments reveal that the proposed technique effectively detects shot boundaries under a variety of camera operations and outperforms in terms of imperceptibility and resilience.

In 2016, bacterial canker symptoms, often with dried ooze, were observed on Salix alba plants in municipal lands and parks in Kerman and Fars provinces, Iran. To determine the causative agent, samples were collected from symptomatic trees, and macerates of the affected bark tissues were plated on sucrose nutrient agar (SNA). Ten isolates were identified by phenotypic characterization, pathogenicity tests, and two of them further confirmed identity using sequence analysis of the partial of 16S rRNA and gyrB genes, and phylogenetic analysis. The isolates showed the highest identity (99–100%) with Brenneria salicis. To our knowledge, this is the first report of watermark disease on S. alba caused by B. salicis in Iran.

With the rapid development of network media, increasing research on reversible watermarking has focused on improving its robustness to resisting attacks during digital media transmission. There are some other reversible watermarking schemes that work in the encrypted domain for preserving the privacy of the cover image. The robustness of the watermarking and the privacy preserving of the cover image have become the key factors of reversible watermarking. However, there are few robust reversible watermarking schemes in the encrypted domain that could resist common attacks (such as JPEG compression, noise addition) and preserve privacy at the same time. In addition, the embedding capacity of a robust watermark and the efficiency of the encryption method must be considered. Recently, cloud computing technology has led to the rapid growth of network media, and many multimedia properties are owned by multiple parties, such as a film’s producer and multiple distributors. Multi-party watermarking has become an important demand for network media to protect all parties’ rights. In this paper, a Robust Reversible Watermarking scheme in Encrypted Image with Secure Multi-party (RRWEI-SM) based on lightweight cryptography is first proposed. Additive secret sharing and block-level scrambling are developed to generate the encrypted image. Then, the robust reversible watermarking based on significant bit Prediction Error Expansion (PEE) is performed by Secure Multi-party Computation (SMC). For applications with high robustness, a Modified RRWEI-SM is proposed by exploiting a two-stage architecture. Furthermore, both the RRWEI-SM scheme and Modified RRWEI-SM scheme are separable and can be applied to multiparty copyright protection. The experimental results and theoretical analysis demonstrate here that the RRWEI-SM and the Modified RRWEI-SM are secure, robust and effective.

Genome synthesis endows scientists the ability of de novo creating genomes absent in nature, by thorough redesigning DNA sequences and introducing numerous custom features. However, the genome synthesis is a labor‐ and time‐consuming work, and thus it is a challenge to verify and quantify the synthetic genome rapidly and precisely. Thus, specific DNA sequences different from native genomic sequences are designed into synthetic genomes during synthesis, namely genomic markers. Genomic markers can be easily detected by PCR reaction, whole‐genome sequencing (WGS) and a variety of methods to identify the synthetic genome from native one. Here, we review types and applications of genomic markers utilized in synthetic genomes, with the hope of providing a guidance for future works.

In recent years, the emergence of numerous applications and activities involving the underwater world have given rise to a new class of technologies that takes the name of Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT). Submarine activities such as remote control, pollution monitoring, data collection, disaster detection or even early warning and assisted navigation are just some of the main applications that require the use of underwater communication systems capable of providing connectivity between static and mobile nodes deployed at different depths. Generally, underwater communications employ audio signals which can propagate relatively far but are also significantly affected by Doppler distortions. In fact, physical properties of the water and spatial changes due to tides, currents and waves can cause channel variations or unwanted movements of the transmitter or receiver. A plethora of underwater communication techniques have been developed to address such challenging scenarios. In this thesis, we study how to correct Doppler effects in transmission employing JANUS, the first standard for underwater acoustic communication. In particular, we exploit the JANUS preamble, composed of an m-sequence of 32 pseudo-random symbols, to estimate and compensate for the Doppler shift caused by the relative motion of transceivers up to 5 m/s. The proposed method is validated using Watermark simulator and at-sea experiments. Then, we analyze the performance of S2C both in simulation and in-field experiments, based on our own S2C implementation. We undertake extensive simulation experiments, quantitatively measuring the impact of a variety of modulation parameters (such as the sweep duration and the number of coded symbols per sweep), and under different channel characteristics (depth, range, Doppler speed, etc.). Furthermore, we test the performances of the S2C modulation at sea, obtaining good results also in shallow waters.

Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) wie LoRaWAN werden verwendet, um eine Verbindung zwischen einer Vielzahl an Sensorknoten drahtlos und energiesparend aufzubauen. Solche Netzwerke werden auch Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) genannt und sind ein Teilaspekt des Internet of Things (IoT). Durch die energiesparende Eigenschaft dieser Netze sind die Endgeräte die meiste Zeit in einem energiesparenden Schlafmodus, der im Falle eines Events, wie ein periodischer Alarm, unterbrochen wird. Anschließend wird eine Messung durchgeführt und eine Nachricht über das LPWAN versendet, um danach wieder in den Energiesparmodus zu wechseln. LPWANs sind auch in der Lage eine Kommunikation über weite Strecken zu ermöglichen, diese Weitläufigkeit bietet potenziellen Angreifern die Möglichkeit, die Sensorknoten physisch zu manipulieren, ohne währenddessen entdeckt zu werden. Diese Arbeit präsentiert eine neuartige Methode wie ein ’Side-Channel’ verwendet werden kann, um sicherheitsrelevante Information zu übertragen und dadurch die Sicherheit in WSNs zu verbessern, ohne die energieintensive Sendezeit zu erhöhen. Es wird ein System entwickelt, das bis zu 8 Bits pro Nachricht durch Veränderung der zeitlichen Abstände zwischen Paketen (Inter-Packet Delay (IPD)) codiert, und so die Information in einem Seitenkanal des Nutzsignals überträgt. Weiters wird experimentell nachgewiesen, dass die Modulation in der Lage ist, mit Standardkomponenten und auch unter Feldbedingungen zu arbeiten. Attacken wie zum Beispiel Bit Flipping, bei denen aktiv die Signalübertragung beeinflusst wird, können mit der präsentierten Methode verhindert werden. Das Ergebnis dieser Arbeit kann dazu verwendet werden, die Sicherheit und besonders die Integrität der Nutzdaten in LPWANs zu verbessern, ohne den Kommunikationskanal spürbar zu beeinflussen., Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs), like LoRaWAN, aim to wirelessly connect a multitude of sensor nodes in an energy-efficient way. These, also called Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), are a building block of the Internet of Things (IoT). The low power aspect of such networks implies energy efficiency at the sensor nodes, for which the devices will mainly be in a hibernation state. Events, like a periodic timer, shortly interrupt the sleep state and trigger a message to be sent using the LPWAN. Furthermore, LPWANs impose specific security challenges like attackers that may have physical access to sensor nodes while remaining undetected as a huge spatial area is covered. This thesis presents a multi-bit side-channel modulation technique combined with digital watermarking, which enhances the security in WSNs without additional on-air time. A system is introduced which can embed up to 8 bits of an integrity-protecting watermark into the Inter-Packet Delay (IPD) of subsequent messages. Experiments prove the suitability of the modulation using Commercial of the Shelf (COTS) devices. By keenly analysing the security aspects, it is revealed that the novel concept improves security by mitigating specific attacks, including bit flipping at the sensor node itself. The presented technique contributes to existing and upcoming LPWANs by enhancing protocol security while being transparent to the primary communication channel under certain restrictions.

International audience

Video piracy is a challenging issue in the modern world. Approximately $$90\%$$ 90 % of newly released films were illegally distributed around the world via the Internet. To overcome this issue, video watermarking is an effective process that integrates a logo in video frames as a watermark. Therefore, this paper presents an efficient lossless video-watermarking scheme based on optimal keyframe selection using an intelligent gravitational search algorithm in linear wavelet transform. This technique obtains color motion and motionless frames from the cover video by the histogram difference method. One-level linear wavelet transform is performed on the chrominance channel of motion frames and a low-frequency sub-band LL opts for watermark embedding. The performance of the proposed technique has been evaluated against 12 video processing attacks in terms of imperceptibility and robustness. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed technique outperforms five state-of-the-art schemes on the considered attacks.

In this paper, a novel reversible blind dual-color image watermarking algorithm is proposed by using singular value decomposition (SVD), Hachimoji Deoxyribonucleic Acid (HDNA) biogenetic encryption, coupled map lattice-based Tent–Sine system (TSS-CML) and mathematical Julia set. For watermark embedding, the watermark image is firstly encrypted using 8-bases HDNA sequences, TSS-CML and Julia set image. Then the encrypted HDNA watermark is obtained. Next, decompose the host image into equal non-overlapping blocks and utilize SVD on the randomly selected blocks. Further, embed the HDNA watermark through modifying the relation between the elements in the first column of the matrix U or V. The watermarked image can be eventually attained by carrying out the inverse SVD on all selected blocks. Also a reliable extraction algorithm is designed to recover the watermark from the possibly attacked watermarked images without resorting to the original image. Experimental and analysis results demonstrate that the proposed watermarking scheme has not only an excellent imperceptibility but a strong robustness against the common image processing attacks, geometric attacks and some composite attacks. In addition, the running time taken for hiding and exacting is about 1 s, which is suitable for real-time network transmission and application. In conclusion, the proposed method outperforms the related dual images watermarking algorithms in terms of time performance, extraction effect and robustness.

To protect the patient information in medical images, this article proposes a robust watermarking algorithm for medical images based on Harris-SURF-DCT. First, the corners of the medical image are extracted using the Harris corner detection algorithm, and then, the previously extracted corners are described using the method of describing feature points in the SURF algorithm to generate the feature descriptor matrix. Then, the feature descriptor matrix is processed through the perceptual hash algorithm to obtain the feature vector of the medical image, which is a binary feature vector with a size of 32 bits. Secondly, to enhance the security of the watermark information, the logistic map algorithm is used to encrypt the watermark before embedding the watermark. Finally, with the help of cryptography knowledge, third party, and zero-watermarking technology, the algorithm can embed the watermark without modifying the medical image. When extracting the watermark, the algorithm can extract the watermark from the test image without the original image. In addition, the algorithm has strong robustness to conventional attacks and geometric attacks. Especially under geometric attacks, the algorithm performs better.

To improve the robustness of image watermarking algorithms against geometric attacks such as cropping, rotation, scaling, shearing, projective mapping, a robust image watermarking algorithm based on DT CWT and Schur decomposition is proposed. Firstly, we use Dual Tree Complex Wavelet Transform (DT CWT) to decompose the U component of the original image (cover image), the decomposed low frequency component is divided into non-overlapping N × N blocks, and Schur decomposition is applied in each block. Secondly, we modify maximum primary diagonal value of the upper triangular matrix of each block to embed the watermark. Finally, the Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) features of the watermarked image (stego-image) is saved as the SIFT key for watermark extraction. When extracting the watermark, we first use the SIFT features of stego-image and changed stego-image to obtain the geometric torsion, thereby a spatial synchronization can be guaranteed. And we then use the maximum election statistics to improve the quality of the extracted watermark. Experiment results show that the proposed algorithm can resist geometric attacks, and is more robust than the existing watermarking methods.

In this work, a robust image watermarking method is proposed based on the LWT (lifting wavelet transform) and DNN (Deep Neural Network). Watermark embedding uses wavelet transforms that help in maintaining a high value of imperceptibility and robustness. Different frequency bands are tested to find the optimum balance between robustness and imperceptibility. To check the robustness of proposed work, various attacks like compression attacks, noise attacks and filtering attacks are used. Deep Neural Network is trained to identify the changes made by these attacks on the different frequency bands. The use of high-frequency sub-band (LH (low-high)/LH1/HL (high-low) 2) for watermark insertion enhances the invisibility of scheme. On the contrary, various sub-bands perform differently (in terms o/f robustness) against the different types of attacks. The proposed scheme is tested on 600 images and the average PSNR (peak signal to noise ratio) is found to be 44.1148 dB with the variance of 0.5146 and standard deviation of 0.7173. Also, time analysis shows it to suitable for real-time applications. Comparative analysis suggests that the proposed method depicts improved performance over state-of-the-art techniques in almost all the parameters for most of the cases.

Aiming to reduce the distortion in the existing reversible watermarking for 3D mesh models, this paper generalizes two-dimensional (2D) region nesting to ${n}$ -dimensional space, and proposes a general region nesting based semi-fragile reversible watermarking for authenticating 3D mesh models by combing watermark generation based on vertex projection and mesh topology. For any ${n}$ -dimensional space, each hypercube space is partitioned into several nested watermark sub-spaces, and the watermark is embedded by placing the original vertex and the mapped vertex on a straight line. The watermark is extracted by acquiring the position of the vertices, and its original coordinates can be restored by inverse mapping. Furthermore, a new coordinate system is built for 3D mesh models based on reference vertices to achieve semi-fragility, and the watermarks generated by vertex projection and mesh topology is utilized for integrity authentication. Experimental results and analysis show that the proposed scheme can significantly reduce the distortion, achieve semi-fragility in RST (Rotation, Scaling and Translation) and vertex reordering, identify the tampering type, and accomplish tampering location at vertex level. It has great potential to be applied for content authentication of 3D mesh models.

The research of medical image in the field of anti-counterfeiting and authentication plays a crucial role in the development of hospital digitization. In this paper, a new fragile medical watermarking scheme is proposed using the prime number distribution theorem, chaotic mapping, and Hash. Firstly, an approximate pixel set is constructed according to the distribution of prime numbers, and then the parity of the pixel value is re-granted with chaotic mapping, and Hash. The embedding and extraction of the watermark are done by using logical operations to adjust the pixel value according to the parity of the pixel value and the number of prime numbers contained in the pixel value. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is imperceptible, efficient, and safe. Compared with the existing methods, the proposed scheme achieves the binding of medical image and patient information, as well as exhibits excellent detection and positioning capability, and will have good application prospects in medical image content authentication and tampering detection.

Digital watermarking is one of the techniques used for copyright protection as well as authentication purpose. In this paper, digital watermark embedding and extraction techniques have been used in which a nested type of watermarking (a watermark inside another watermark) has been presented. The main purpose of using the nested watermarking method is, it increases the embedding capacity so that a large amount of information could be embedded. In this method, one watermark is embedded into another watermark. The resultant watermark is considered as main watermark. The main watermark is encrypted and then embedded into the main image. The main goal in encrypting the watermarks before embedding is increased safety. A5/1 encryption algorithm is used for the encryption and decryption purpose. Therefore, our research work focuses on two important things i.e., increased watermark embedding capacity and increased safety.

In telemedicine, images may possibly be tailored deliberately or unintentionally as this transmission may occur all the way through vulnerable networks. Prior to making any investigative judgment, the integrity of watermarked medical image has to be validated by the medical practitioner so as to avoid erroneous verdict. An approach that can be used to verify the integrity of medical images is digital watermarking. This paper proposes a watermarking algorithm which conforms to all unique requirements of medical image watermarking viz. complete restoration of original cover image after watermark extraction, vital parts being not tampered at all and lossless watermarking. Unique blood vessel pattern in vicinity of optic disk is strategically combined with patient ID to create secret share. Reversible watermarking has been used to embed secret share in Region of Non-Interest (RONI). High values of PSNR (greater than 69 dB) and SSIM have been achieved which imply that the algorithm is highly imperceptible in nature. Proposed system protects the image without modifying its most vital components, and permits the total restoration of the original image with verification of its authenticity and integrity. Unique Feature Extraction makes the proposed algorithm suitable for the purpose of distinctive identification of medical images during transmission and storage in large distributed databases along with enhanced security and confidentiality in tele-ophthalmological applications.

Due to the rapid increase in exchange of text information via internet network, the security and the reliability of the digital content has become a major research issue. The main challenges faced by researchers are content authentication, integrity verification and tampering detection of digital contents. In this paper, these issues are addressed with great emphasis on text information, which is natural language dependent. Hence, a novel intelligent zero-watermarking approach is proposed for content authentication and tampering detection of Arabic text contents. In the proposed approach, both the embedding and extracting of the watermark are logically implemented, which causes no change on the digital text. This is achieved by using fourth-level-order and alphanumeric mechanism of Markov model as a soft computing technique for the analysis of Arabic text to obtain the features of the given text which is considered as the digital watermark. This digital watermark is later used for the detection of any tampering attack on the received Arabic text. An extensive set of experiments using four datasets of varying lengths proves the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of robustness, effectiveness and applicability under multiple random locations of insertion, reorder and deletion attacks. Compared with baseline approaches, the proposed approach has improved performance regarding watermark robustness and tampering detection accuracy.

Digital medical images and image sequences, such as magnetic resonance imaging, computed tomography, and ultrasound, are widely used to diagnose diseases and abnormalities. The secure storage and exchange of such images and image sequences present challenges for hospital management. The objective of this study is to provide a framework for the integrity verification and copyright protection of medical images and image sequences. We design a systematic dual-medium watermarking model that focuses on the security of these images and sequences. Watermark bits (Wbs) are embedded in the transformed and temporal domains of images and image sequences, respectively, instead of in the spatial domain. The images are transformed using integer wavelet transforms, and motion vectors (MVs) are estimated from the image sequences to transform them into the temporal domain using seven block-matching algorithms. The best-performing MVs during frame reconstruction are reconstructed using a genetic algorithm to improve imperceptibility in the watermark-embedded image sequences. To increase the embedding capacity, the Wbs are embedded in regions with minimum or no movement, contrary to the conventional method. Conventionally, Wbs are embedded in regions of image sequences with significant movements. We evaluate the proposed model on typically used MATLAB test images and video datasets available online in Luminance (Y), blue–luminance (U), red–luminance (V) format. A comparison with five state-of-the-art methods shows that the proposed model outperforms the other methods in terms of imperceptibility and embedding capacity.

In recent years, we face an increasing interest in protecting multimedia data and copyrights due to the high exchange of information. Attackers are trying to get confidential information from various sources, which brings the importance of securing the data. Many researchers implemented techniques to hide secret information to maintain the integrity and privacy of data. In order to protect confidential data, histogram-based reversible data hiding with other cryptographic algorithms are widely used. Therefore, in the proposed work, a robust method for securing digital video is suggested. We implemented histogram bit shifting based reversible data hiding by embedding the encrypted watermark in featured video frames. Histogram bit shifting is used for hiding highly secured watermarks so that security for the watermark symbol is also being achieved. The novelty of the work is that only based on the quality threshold a few unique frames are selected, which holds the encrypted watermark symbol. The optimal value for this threshold is obtained using the Firefly Algorithm. The proposed method is capable of hiding high-capacity data in the video signal. The experimental result shows the higher capacity and video quality compared to other reversible data hiding techniques. The recovered watermark provides better identity identification against various attacks. A high value of PSNR and a low value of BER and MSE is reported from the results.

E-healthcare framework requires transfer of patient report to a specialist in a real time framework. Subsequently, any damage to patient information can prompt a wrong diagnosis that can be deadly for the patient. To guarantee a secure communication in E-healthcare framework, a high capacity dual image reversible data hiding algorithm has been presented in this paper. Highlight of proposed method is to embed $$\lfloor \log _{2}(2 \times n+1) \times NZ -1 \rfloor$$ binary bits of patient information whereas no overflow problem has occurred during embedding process. For authentication analysis of electronic patient information (EPI) at recipient end, a fragile watermark has also been embedded with EPI respectively. To prove the effectiveness of proposed method, experiments have been performed on different test images. The average embedding rate of 2.36 bpp for all test images which demonstrates that the method is capable for embedding high payload in comparison of others respectively.

This paper proposes a robust and high embedding capacity watermarking technique where two watermarks are embedded in a color image. A gray-scale image is embedded as one of the watermarks to identify the ownership of the host image using Stationary Wavelet Transform (SWT) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). A binary watermark with the help of the least significant bit method is embedded to locate the tampers. This technique is optimized to have better robustness against various attacks by employing meta-heuristics. The performance of the Genetic Algorithm (GA), Invasive Weed Optimization (IWO) and Teaching Learning Based Optimization (TLBO) is analyzed on the proposed watermarking technique. A novel fitness function is proposed to optimize color image watermarking. This technique is applied to standard images and medical images. The performance of the meta-heuristics on the proposed method is compared with respect to the imperceptibility, robustness, the number of pixels changing rate (NPCR) and computation complexity.

This manuscript proposes a new data hiding approach that is used in watermark applications in video by transforming the RGB model to HSV model. This method initially estimates the number of frames needed to embed the data (watermark). Then two sets of RGB (Red, Green, Blue) coefficients (R1, G1, B1), (R2, G2, B2) are converted to HSV (Hue, saturation, values) Coefficients (H1, S1, V1) and (H2, S2, V2). The ‘Value’ Coefficients V1 and V2 are used to embed the watermark, since there exists a strong correlation between the adjacent ‘Value’ Coefficients. The same process is repeated on adjacent HSV coefficients till the watermark is fully embedded. After embedding the data HSV coefficients are again converted back to RGB coefficients. During the extraction phase, the data is extracted by transforming the RGB coefficient to HSV coefficients. One bit of information can be extracted from two adjacent HSV coefficients. Experimental outcomes show that the proposed watermarking approach is efficiently against attacks, viz noise, filtering, etc. Also, the proposed method performs better than traditional watermarking methods with the help of embedding rate (bpp), Structural similarity index measurement (SSIM), Visual quality (PSNR), Normalized cross-correlation (NC).

With the increase in point of care services, communication of digital patient records through open network has multi-folded. This digital data is used to obtain the remote medical assistance from the smart healthcare centres. Protecting this data during transmission is a very big challenge. One of the most important medical data is electrocardiogram (ECG) signal which detects the cardiovascular diseases and any alteration in the signal may affect the diagnosis. In this work, an ECG watermarking based on redundant discrete wavelet transform (RDWT) and singular value decomposition (SVD) is developed. First, the ECG signal is converted into 2-D matrix using pan-tompkins algorithm. Then, we use the hybrid of RDWT and SVD to conceal the patient data and logo image into the 2-D ECG image. We also use hybrid of optimization scheme to improve the robustness of the watermark. Preliminary experimental results indicate the optimal invisibility and robustness result is more effective up to 97.89% than the traditional schemes respectively, which makes it suitable for ownership authentication of ECG signal.

Healthcare has experienced significant growth in recent years, bringing both advantages and downsides. It is more difficult to provide a precise diagnosis using digitally transmitted medical images in today's digital age. Using an adaptive neuro-fuzzy model and an integrated watermark transformation mechanism, this study proposes a new approach for watermarking medical images based on Region of interest (ROI). Isolating the ROI from the original medical image will be accomplished first using adaptive neuro-fuzzy training techniques. Second, as a consequence of wavelet decomposition, where subbands are exchanged using a logistic mapping based on the magnitude value of each subband, all pixels are exchanged, resulting in medical data that is encrypted and unbreakable. To make the watermark image more stable, singular values are computed, and major components are calculated to prevent false-positive mistakes. When the source and watermark images are changed to separate values, this key variable is used. Finally, through an adaptive authentication code, the scheme suggested tests the strength of protection. Moreover, the authentication code is integrated into the medical image with a new image scale-up process results in better security.

Field programmable gate array (FPGA) bitstreams contain information on the functionality of all hardware intellectual property (IP) cores used in a given design, so if an attacker gains access to the bitstream, they can mount attacks on the IP. Various mechanisms have been proposed to protect IP from reverse engineering and theft. However, there are no examples of IP obfuscation in FPGA bitstreams that also intrinsically enable tamper detection and authentication at no additional hardware cost. In this letter, we propose a mutable architecture-based watermarking scheme called WATERMARCH, a novel technique of authenticated obfuscation utilizing a hash-based message authentication code (HMAC) to cryptographically mesh the obfuscation and watermark with the original design, with no additional overhead beyond the underlying obfuscation method. While collaboration between the IP owner and FPGA vendor is necessary to facilitate parsing of the bitstream, once the bitstream is parsable, the watermark can be extracted to prove authorship of the IP or confirm the presence of malicious IP modification, providing tremendous benefits to both IP owners and end users.

Forensic watermarking is used to track down digital pirates after they illegally redistribute video content. Although existing algorithms often resist common signal processing attacks, they are not always robust against camcording attacks. As a solution in the state of the art, registration methods are used to align the attacked video to the original one. However, watermark detection still fails when the quality is sufficiently decreased or when exposed to targeted attacks. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel fallback system that aims to detect the watermark when traditional methods fail. More concretely, we demonstrate that a primary watermark embedded by a traditional scheme indirectly creates a secondary watermark signal during video encoding. This secondary watermark consists of compression artifacts and is detected by the fallback system. Additionally, the proposed system incorporates video registration to cope with camcording attacks. The experimental results indicate that the fallback system has a striking increase in robustness compared to the existing methods. For example, the observed false-negative rate for targeted attacks improves from 100% to 0%. Moreover, the fallback is camcording resistant even when the traditional method combined with registration is not. In conclusion, the proposed system can be used as a fallback when traditional detection fails.

Ownership evidence can be directly exposed through visible watermarks which can avoid the attempts of copyright abuses. JPEG images are widely used for many commercial applications in Internet, because of its reduced size and the requirement of low bandwidth. In this paper, a visible watermarking scheme is proposed for JPEG compressed images. This scheme is based on the modification of frequency coefficients of original image with respect to the frequency coefficients of watermark image. In JPEG compression, forward discrete cosine transform (DCT) phase is processed to embed visible watermarks. Different sizes of color and grayscale watermark images can be embedded in the carrier image with high visibility. Experimental results confirm the quality of the proposed visible watermarking scheme.

Linear deception attacks can bypass the χ 2 detector by tampering with data. In this paper, we provide a secure strategy for a cyber physical system (CPS) against such attacks. In response to these attacks in multi-sensor system, we encrypt the innovation sequence by a watermark, so that they can help the χ 2 detector better detect the original undetected linear deception attacks when the attacker does not know the existence of the watermark. Simultaneously, when the attacker has information about the watermark, the estimated performance and control performance will not be reduced by adjusting the parameters of the watermark. Finally, the effectiveness of this defense strategy against deception attacks is verified by a numerical example.

According to the ever-growing supply and demand of IoT content, IoT big data in diversified applications are deemed a valuable asset by private and public sectors. Their privacy protection has been a hot research topic. Inspired by previous work on bounded-error-pruned IoT content market, we observe that the anonymity protection with robust watermarking can be developed by further pruning data for better resource-efficient IoT big data without violating the required quality of sensor service or quality of decision-making. In this paper, resource-efficient anonymity protection with watermarking is thus proposed for data consumers and owners of IoT big data market via blockchain. Our proposed scheme can provide the IoT data with privacy protections of both anonymity and ownership in IoT big data market with resource efficiency. The experiments of four different-type IoT datasets with different settings included bounded-errors, sub-stream sizes, watermark lengths, and ratios of data tampering. The performance results demonstrated that our proposed scheme can provide data owners and consumers with ownership and anonymity via watermarking the IoT big data streams for lossless compressibility. Meanwhile, the developed DApp with our proposed scheme on the Ethereum blockchain can help data owners freely share and trade with consumers in convenience with availability, reliability, and security without mutual trust.

Various document types play an influential role in a lot of our lives activities today; hence preserving their integrity is an important matter. Such documents have various forms, including texts, videos, sounds, and images. The latter types' authentication will be our concern here in this paper. Images can be handled spatially by doing the proper modification directly on their pixel values or spectrally through conducting some adjustments to some of the addressed coefficients. Due to spectral (frequency) domain flexibility in handling data, the domain coefficients are utilized for the watermark embedding purpose. The integer wavelet transform (IWT), which is a wavelet transform based on the lifting scheme, is adopted in this paper in order to provide a direct way for converting image pixels' integer values to integer coefficient values rather than floating point coefficients that could be produced by the traditional wavelet transform. This direct relation can enhance the processed image quality due to avoiding the rounding operations on the floating point coefficients. The well-known parity bit approach is also utilized in this paper as an authentication mechanism, where 3 secret parity bits are used for each block in an image which is divided into non-overlapped blocks in order to enforce a form of fragile watermark approach. Thus, any alteration in the block pixels could cause the adopted (even) parity to be violated. The fragile watermarking is achieved through the modification of least significant bits ((LSBs) of certain frequency coefficients' according to the even parity condition. In spite of this image watermarking operation, the proposed method is efficient. In order to prove the efficiency of our proposed method, it was tested against standard images using measurements like peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index (SSIM). Experiments showed promising results; the method preserves high image quality (PSNR≈ 44.4367dB, SSIM≈ 0.9956) and good tamper detection capability.

Digital identifier is a technology used to prove ownership of a work. At this time, the Digital Object Identifier is a form of implementation of the digital identifier used in every scientific work. Not infrequently there are several cases of theft of ownership or copyright of a work, both scientific works, and certain other works. Watermarking is a technique created to protect the ownership of works. Watermarking techniques can be applied to several media such as audio, video, and also documents, one of which is the Portable Document Format document file. In this study, researchers want to build copyright protection for scientific works. Researchers offer research concepts using a Digital Object Identifier which is always installed on scientific papers to be published. The Digital Object Identifier will later become the basic data in building the Quick Response Code. The Digital Object Identifier of each scientific work will not be the same as each other, this will certainly make the Quick Response Code more unique. The results show that the watermarking process in building copyright protection of scientific works can be very successful Quick Response Code can be read and detected properly without experiencing lag time. Quick Response Code readings from several variations of motion are also not very influential, so it can be concluded that distance does not limit the detection of Quick Response Codes. From this research, researchers can deduce that the watermark is performed on the scientific work not only serves as the copyright protection of that scientific paper but can also be an alternative for other researchers to access the scientific work.