An image sanitizing scheme using digital watermarking

Abstract

We developed an efficient and secure image sanitizing scheme that enables integrity check and authentication of a sanitized image. Sanitizing is to delete or conceal sensitive data such as national secrets or personal information in digital images/documents. With a typical digital signature or digital watermarking scheme, a sanitized image cannot be authenticated because the integrity of the content is broken when it is sanitized. Our image sanitizing scheme solves this problem by combining a digital signature, digital watermarking and error correction technique with Reed-Solomon (RS) code. In addition, due to the RS encoding, we can realize the lightweight image sanitizing with small signature size, which is quite significant for the practical implementation. Furthermore, we investigate the security of our image sanitizing scheme. Considering the security requirements for image sanitizing, our scheme turned out to be quite effective to safely release a sensitive image to the public. The detailed explanation of our image sanitizing scheme and its security evaluation are given in this paper. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.