A reversible watermarking scheme for vector maps based on multilevel histogram modification

Abstract

To protect the security of vector maps, we propose a novel reversible watermarking scheme for vector maps based on a multilevel histogram modification. First, a difference histogram is constructed using the correlations of adjacent coordinates, and the histogram is divided into continuous regions and discontinuous regions by combining the characteristics of vector map data. Second, the histogram bins that require modification are determined in the continuous regions through the optimal peak value, and the peak values are chosen from the flanking discontinuous regions in both directions; the watermarks are embedded by adopting the multilevel histogram modification strategy. The watermark extraction process is the reverse of the embedding process, and after completing the watermark extraction, the carrier data can be recovered losslessly. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has good invisibility and is completely reversible. Compared with similar algorithms reported previously, it achieves higher watermark embedding capacity under the same embedding distortion with lower complexity, thereby having a higher application value.