Consecutive Difference Expansion Based Reversible DNA Watermarking

Of recent interests on high capacity DNA storage, DNA watermarking for DNA copyright protection, and DNA steganography for DNA secret communication are augmented, the reversible DNA watermarking is much needed both to embed the watermark without changing the functionality of organism and to perfectly recover the host DNA sequence. In this paper, we address two ways of DE based reversible DNA watermarking using noncoding DNA sequence. The reversible DNA watermarking should consider the string structure of a DNA sequence, the organism functionality, the perfect recovery, and the high embedding capacity. We convert the string sequence of four characters in noncoding region to the decimal coded values and embed the watermark bit into coded values by two ways; DE based multiple bits embedding (DE-MBE) using pairs of neighbor coded values and consecutive DE-MBE (C-DE-MBE). Two ways process the comparison searching to prevent the false start codon that produces false coding region. Experimental results verified that our ways have more high embedding capacity than conventional methods and produce no false start codon and recover perfectly the host sequence without the reference sequence. Especially C-DE-MBE can embed more high two times than DE-MBE.