A robust multimedia authentication and restoration scheme in digital photography

Image authentication and restoration is an important area of modern research. In digital photography, copyright protection is very crucial. Visible signatures distract from the meaning of the photograph as well as they are easy to be removed by using advanced softwares. Invisible watermarks provide protection, offer a better look to photographs than visible watermarking, and prevent the photographs from unauthorized manipulations. A robust multiple watermarking scheme is required which could invisibly protect the content and also should survive the manipulations for later verification and restoration. In this paper, a robust and imperceptible multimedia authentication and restoration scheme is proposed. The security of Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is utilized to make an encrypted watermark. The encrypted watermark is then embedded into photographs in the salient regions by proposed Feature-Closest Point Transform (F-CPT) algorithm. The second watermark is generated by wavelet decomposition and embedded in the second and third level wavelet sub-bands of the cover photographs. Several security attacks are performed e.g. noise attack, compression attack, resizing attack, rotation attack, collage attack, and cropping attack on multiple watermarked photographs to examine the system robustness by normalized cross correlation (NCC) for retrieved authentication watermarks. Result of PSNR, MSE, and SSIM show the high imperceptibility of our technique and aesthetic score (AS) shows the aesthetic quality of watermarked photographs (WPs).