Zero watermarking for the tin dem data based on the edge length

Abstract

How to keep the fidelity of the digital elevation model (DEM) data is a crucial problem in the current watermarking research, as the watermarked DEM data need to preserve their accuracy. We proposed a zero watermarking method for the triangulated irregular network (TIN) DEM data. It takes full advantage of the characteristics of the edge length in the TIN DEM data. First, the radio of the edge lengths is quantified to the watermark index, and then the comparison of the edge lengths is quantified to the watermark bit. Finally, the watermark is constructed by combing the watermark bits according to the watermark indices with the help of the majority voting mechanism. In the method, the TIN DEM data are only used to construct the watermark, not to be embedded by the watermark. Therefore, the data quality is preserved to the greatest extent. Experiments verify the theoretical achievements of this method and demonstrate the method is lossless to the TIN DEM data. Simulation results also show that the method has good robustness on translation, rotation, scaling, and cropping attacks.