XOR based LSB watermarking for information protection in land consolidation project

Land consolidation plays an important role in enlarging farming plots and enhancing crop productivity. And remote sensing imagery can provide the spatial data/maps and offer great advantages for the fulfillment of a land consolidation project. This paper presents a LSB watermarking algorithm to embed the land reorganization planning map into a remote sensing image of the same area for information security and copyright protection. The land reorganization planning map is compressively encoded before embedded into the protected remote sensing image. The contradiction between large information quantity and invisibility of digital water marking is perfectly eliminated. To avoid the shortcoming of being easily attacked in the original LSB method, the host image is preprocessed by exclusive-OR (XOR) operation. That is, the value of the least signification bit is decided by the XOR result of the first seven bits. The watermark signal is embedded into the LSB of the processed host image by XOR operation. The experimental results fully illustrate that the embedded watermark is not only imperceptible to the human eyes, but also has better security in the statistical sense.