Secure Content Protection and Verification Framework for Digital Images Communication

Abstract

Data security is an urgent and important dilemma in recent times because of the fast growth of the Internet and multimedia applications. Steganography, watermarking, and encryption techniques may be utilized to achieve data robustness and confidentiality. In this paper, the content-based image verification and data integrity technique are introduced. This technique is reliable and appropriate for confirming the reliability of images communicated through unreliable channels. First, the transferred image is divided into a number of dedicated blocks with different block sizes. Then, several discrete transformations like the DFT (Discrete Fourier Transforms), DWT (Discrete Wavelet Transform), and DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) are employed and tested individually. They are utilized to insert a block-based watermark for every image block in an alternative image block corresponding to a certain mechanism. The marked image is transmitted over a wireless channel with various corruptions and attacks. On the receiver side, the embedded watermarks for each image block are obtained to distinguish dubious falsification behaviors. Various image analyses and comparisons are employed to test and examine the reliability of the proposed technique to accomplish superior content verification and safeguard images communicated over vulnerable transmission networks. Assessment findings approve the rightness of the suggested technique for different multimedia applications with confidential information categories like military services. In addition, comparative experimental findings and results demonstrate that the suggested content-based image verification and data integrity technique applying the DFT is the best protection framework contrasted with the DWT and DCT, as it achieves in the case of the Peppers image a low MSE of 6.1787, high PSNR of 46.2765 dB, and high C_r of 0.9933 at a 4 × 4 block size. These achievements ensure and confirm that the proposed method is an effective methodology for multimedia integrity and validation applications.