Secure Watermarking using Diophantine Equations for Authentication and Recovery

Abstract

This paper describes an authentication scheme that uses Diophantine equations based generation of the secret locations to embed the authentication and recovery watermark in the DWT sub-bands. The security lies in the difficulty of finding a solution to the Diophantine equation. The scheme uses the content invariant features of the image as a self-authenticating watermark and a quantized down sampled approximation of the original image as a recovery watermark for visual authentication, both embedded securely using secret locations generated from solution of the Diophantine equations formed from the PQ sequences. The scheme is mildly robust to Jpeg compression and highly robust to Jpeg2000 compression. The scheme also ensures highly imperceptible watermarked images as the spatio –frequency properties of DWT are utilized to embed the dual watermarks.