A fragile watermarking scheme protecting originator's rights for multimedia service

Abstract

In ubiquitous environments, users of multimedia service can access to rich multimedia content any time any where, via user-friendly and easy-to-carry handheld, mobile and wearable devices such as mobile phones, PDAs, laptops and even vehicles. Besides the usual requirement of ensuring the integrity and privacy of these contents as they travel from one device to the next, there is also a need for optimal bandwidth use of these devices to ensure the user's comfort in hassle-free access. Fragile watermarking schemes is one measure used to ensure integrity of content, typically images. Fragile watermarking schemes commonly exploit particular properties of transmitted images and thus provide localization and semi-fragility features not found in image authentication schemes based on purely cryptographic techniques. The basic idea in an image authentication scheme is to compute and insert an authentication mark into the image, and later during verification to recompute the same mark and compare with the inserted version for a match. In the context of the optimal bandwidth ubiquitous environment, we formulate the notion of the originator's rights to his multimedia content. We then propose a fragile watermarking scheme that achieves this notion, thereby making optimal use of the bandwidth. This scheme also prevents two problems that we highlight on a previous fragile scheme by Byun et al. As an aside, our results appear to be the first analysis of the Byun et al. scheme. Furthermore our proposed scheme is one of the only three known SVD-based fragile watermarking schemes to date, and the only one that protects the originator's rights. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.