Copyright protection based on zero watermarking and blockchain for vector maps

Abstract

Zero watermarking does not alter the original information contained in vector map data and provides perfect imperceptibility. The use of zero watermarking for data copyright protection has become a significant trend in digital watermarking research. However, zero watermarking encounters tremendous obstacles to its development and application because of its requirement to store copyright information with a third party and its difficulty in confirming copyright ownership. Aiming at the shortcomings of the existing zero watermarking technology, this paper proposes a new zero watermarking construction method based on the angular features of vector data that store the zero watermarking and copyright information on the blockchain after an XOR operation. When the watermark is being extracted, the copyright information can be extracted with the XOR operation to obtain the information stored on the blockchain. Experimental results show that the combination of zero watermarking and blockchain proposed in this paper gives full play to the advantages of the two technologies and protects the copyright of data in a lossless fashion. Compared with the traditional zero watermarking algorithms, the proposed zero watermarking algorithm exhibits stronger robustness. Moreover, the proposed data copyright protection framework with a combination of zero watermarking and blockchain can also be applied to other data types, such as images, audio, video, and remote sensing images.